The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S.
Department of Justice and prepared the following final report:
Document Title: Controlling Drugs and Social Disorder Using
Civil Remedies: Final Report of a Randomized
Field Experiment in Oakland, California
Author(s): Lorraine Green Mazerolle ; Jan Roehl
Document No.: 179280
Date Received: November 22, 1999
Award Number: 95-IJ-CX-0039
This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice.
To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally-
funded grant final report available electronically in addition to
traditional paper copies.
Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect
the official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice.
Controlling Drugs and Social Disorder Using Civil Remedies:
Final Report of a Randomized Field Experiment in Oakland, California'
Lorraine Green Mazerolle
University of Cincinnati
&
Jan Roehl
Justice Research Center
Submitted to the National Institute of Justice
May, 1998
I This research was supported by grant no. 95-IJ-CX-0039 from the National Institute of
Justice to the University of Cincinnati. Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are
those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice. The authors are indebted to the support from the Oakland Police
Department with special appreciation to Sergeant Tom Hogenmiller, Daphne Markham, Clarence
Fisher, Dave Walsh, and the police officers, service technicians, and support staff of the Beat
Health Unit. We would also like to thank Colleen Kadleck, James Frank Price, Michael Pellino
and John Schwartz from the Center for Criminal Justice Research at the University of Cincinnati
for their important contiibutions to this final product.
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................... ..
1-iv
.
I INTRODUCTION .......................................................... 1
I1. OAKLAND AS THE RESEARCH SITE ..................................... -5
.
I11 OAKLAND’S BEAT HEALTH PROGRAM .................................... 6
.
IV RESEARCH METHODS .................................................. 8
Description of the Experimental and Control Sites ............................. 12
Beat Health Interventions in Experimental Sites ............................... 12
.
V CALLSFORSERVICE ................................................... 17
Calls For Service Data ................................................... 18
Citywide Changes ...................................................... 22
Leaving Out the Intervention Period fiom the Analysis ........................ -23
Main Effects of the Experimental Intervention ................................ 25
Displacement and Diffusion Effects of the Experiment ......................... 34
a .
VI ON-SITEOBSERVATIONS ...............................................
Observation Method .....................................................
38
40
Results ............................................................... 41
.
VI1 PLACEMANAGERSURVEY ............................................ 45
PlaceMangerSurvey .................................................... 45
Survey Sample ......................................................... 46 .
Sample Characteristics ................................................... 47
Sample Characteristics at the Street Block Unit of Analysis ...................... 47
Results ............................................................... 53
.
VI11 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ....................................... 63
REFERENCES .............................................................. 69
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
LIST OF TABLES
Table 5.1. Summary of Call Incidents (January 1994 to March 1997) ..............21
Table 5.2. Percent Change and Mean Number of Selected Call Incedents
Per Month Pre and Post Intervention Citywide Compared to All
Study Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3
Table 5.3. Before and During Beat Health Intervention Comparisons for
Selected Call Types for Citywide, Experimental, and Control
Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4
Table 5.4. Mean Changes in Calls for Service Incidents, Pre Versus Post
Intervention Periods (by Call Type) with Street Blocks as the
Unit of Analysis .............................................. .27
Table 5.5. Mean Changes in Calls for Service Incidents, Pre Versus Post
Intervention Periods (by Call Type) With Target Sites Only as
the Unit of Analysis ........................................... .29
Table 5.6. Number of Study Sites with Changes in Calls for Service by
Crime Type and Group (Control vs Experiment) ..................... .36
Table 6.1. Changes in Social Activity and Physical Disorder (per street block),
Pre Versus Post Intervention Periods (by group) ................... 42-43
Table 7.1. Place Manager Individual Action Scale ............................ .48
Table 7.2. Place Manager Cohesiveness Scale ............................... .49
Table 7.3. Place Manager Collective Action Scale ............................. 50
Table 7.4. FeadAvoidance Scale .......................................... .51
Table 7.5. Descriptive Statistics For All Study Variables ....................... .52
Table 7.6. OLS Regression Results for Changes in Signs of Disorder ..............56
Table 7.7. Tobit Results for Changes in Males Selling Drugs .................... ,58
Table 7.8. OLS Regression Results for Changes in Signs of Civil Behavior ~
in Public Places ............................................... .60
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Oakland California: 100 Study Sites ................................ 11
Figure 2. Number of Drug Calls for Service by Month for Experimental and
Control Street Blocks (January 1994 to March 1997) ...................31
Figure 3. Number of Drug Calls for Service by Month for Experimental and
Control Target Sites (January 1994 to March 1997) .................... .32
APPENDICES
Appendix NCensus Maps
City of Oakland 1990 Population
City of Oakland 1990 Population by Race (White)
City of Oakland 7+ Persons in Household (1990)
City of Oakland Household Married with Children < 18 years
City of Oakland Educational Attainment (25+ High School Graduate)
City of Oakland Household Income in 1989 (e$5,000)
City of Oakland Median Household Income (1989)
City of Oakland Households Receiving Public Assistance in 1989
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
iy
C t of Oakland Owner Occupied Housing Units
City of Oakland Median Gross Rent (Renter Occupied Housing Units)
City of Oakland Aggregate Gross Rent (Renter Occupied Units)
City of Oakland Median Value Owner Occupied Housing Unit
Appendix B- Beat Health Study Community Survey Codebook
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
I
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Civil remedies are procedures and sanctions, specified by civil statutes and regulations,
i
used to prevent or reduce criminal problems and incivilities. Civil remedies typically am
to persuade or coerce non-offending third parties to take responsibility and action to
prevent or end criminal or nuisance behavior.
Oakland’s Beat Health program is an example of a civil remedy program. The Beat
Health program seeks to control drug and disorder problems and restore order by
focusing on the physical decay conditions of targeted commercial establishments, private
homes, and rental properties.
0 In our study, fifty street blocks were randomly assigned to the Oakland Police
Department’s civil remedy program (“Beat Health”) and the other fifty street blocks were
randomly assigned to the general patrol division.
To enable close examination of the impact of Beat Health on residential and commercial
properties, we used a blocked randomized experimental design by assigning commercial
properties to one block and residential properties into a second block.
Most of the study sites were rental properties (77 percent).
Drug dealing was reported as a major problem prior to the start of the experiment in
approximately three-quarters of the locations in both the control and experimental sites.
Other complaints included rat and roach infestations, prostitution, trespassing, problems
with pit bulls andor other animals, and other health and welfare issues.
Formal actions taken by Beat Health officers at the experimental sites included
Specialized Multi-Agency Response Team (SMART) inspections (n = 23), sending
general warning letters (n = 9), sending 11570 warning letters (n = 1 ) issuing beat
3,
orders (n = 9), working with property owners to evict troublesome tenants (n = 19), and
property clean-ups.
0 During the 23 SMART inspections instigated against experimental target sites, city .
inspectors issued nine housing and safety citations, six vector control violations, two
sidewalk citations, and one sewer violation. The city attorney’s office did not file suit
against any of the experimental site owners during the period of our experimental
tracking (one year).
-1-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
t
0 We examined 1,765,461 call incidents fiom January 1994 to March 1997 in our main
impact assessment.
0 u
O r results reveal statistically significant differences when the experimental sites were
compared to the control sites for changes in drug call incidents: while calls about drug
incidents increased for both groups, the experimental group increased by just over 10
percent whereas the control group increased by 66 percent in the mean number of calls
per month when the pre-intervention period was compared to post intervention period.
Calls about drug problems at the 100 study sites increased abruptly during the three
month period immediately before the start of the interventions. As such, some of the
'
decline in drug problems that were observed in our data could be attributed to a
u
regression toward the mean. O r significant differences between the control and
experimental group changes, however, suggest that the Beat Health Program has some
positive influence in harnessing the increase of drug problems on a street block.
0 The Beat Health program is particularly effective in reducing drug problems in the short
run. In the long run we observe a return to earlier levels of drug problems.
There were no significant differences between the experimental and control groups for
violent, property, or disorder call incidents when the before period was compared to the
after period.
0 When the block effects were examined -namely the differences between the
commercial and residential properties -we found significant differences for violent
crimes and drug call incidents.
0 For violent crime call incidents, our results show decreases in both the control and
experimental sites for residential properties, yet increases (especially in the experimental
sites) for commercial properties.
0 For call incidents about drug problems, by contrast, our results show decreases in call
incidents at both experimental commercial and residential properties yet increases in calls
about drugs at both control residential and commercial sites. The increase i drug calls at
n
commercial properties in control sites is especially large.
0 There were very few differences in the changes depicting displacement and diffision of
crime control effects when the buffer zones and targets were examined across crime call
types and when the control and experimental groups were compared.
..
-11-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
0 Structured observations of routine licit activity (e.g., pedestrians, children playing, people
coming in and out of businesses), illicit activity (e.g., drug dealing, loitering, urinating in
public), litter, graffiti, trash, traffic, and the presence of law enforcement and security
personnel were made of each face block surrounding the 100 problem locations.
0 Our observations showed statistically significant differences between the control and
experimental groups in the number of males selling drugs: we observed fewer males
selling drugs on experimental street blocks yet more males selling drugs after the
intervention period at the control sites.
Signs of disorder increased slightly for the experimental group yet increased significantly
more on the control group street blocks.
0 u
O r on-site observations also showed that there were fewer adult males and females
loitering, fewer youths loitering, fewer males with boom boxes, homeless people and
people drinking in public in the experimental street blocks after the experiment. These
results, however were not statistically significant.
0 We conducted interviews with 398 “place managers” living or working on the 100 target
street blocks in our study at the end of the five-month experimental intervention period.
We define the place managers in our study as those people who live or work near
problem places and who, by virtue of their proximity and interests, may have primary or
personal responsibility to the street block.
0 Nearly half of the survey respondents were African American and 21 percent were white;
52 percent of the respondents were male; and the mean age of respondents was 47 years.
0 There were no significant differences between the responses given by the resident and
store ownedmanager place managers on measures of place manager demographic
characteristics, feelings of fear of crime, and perceptions of cohesiveness. There were,
however, slightly more business store owners or managers who knew about the Beat
Health Program than residents. Business store owners and managers were also more
likely to take their own initiative in solving problems on the block than residents.
About three quarters of the street blocks in our study had at least one place manager who
took some type of direct action during the experimental intervention period.
About half (48 percent) of the street blocks had at least one place manager who reported
calling the police using 91 1.
0 About 73 percent of the street blocks in our study had at least one place manager who
reported that they were involved in community activities.
...
-111-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
The vast majority (90 percent) of street blocks in our study had at least one or more place
managers who stated they were fearful of walking alone at night on their block.
0 u
O r results reveal that the level of place manager collective involvement in community
activism is associated with decreases in signs of disorder and with increases in levels of
signs of civil behavior in public places on the street blocks in our study.
0 Levels of perceived street block cohesiveness were found to play a significant role in
decreases in males selling drugs.
0 We also found that the experimental street blocks were also places that evidenced
decreases in signs of disorder, decreases in males selling drugs, and increases in signs of
civil behavior in public places.
0 Individual, direct actions (e.g., calling 91 1) taken by place managers in an attempt to
solve problems at specific target locations were not associated with decreased levels of
social and physical disorder on the street blocks in our study.
0 Our results indicate that police efforts to impact drug and disorder problems can be
effective independent of the existing social climate on a street block. Conversely, our
results also point to the importance of effective place management in controlling drug and
disorder problems, independent of police efforts to solve street block problems.
0 Overall, we conclude that fairly simple and expedient civil remedies applied by police
officers, with the help of municipal agencies, are effective in reducing drug and disorder
problems.
-iv-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
,
CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
Civil remedies are procedures and sanctions, specified by civil statutes and regulations,
used to prevent or reduce criminal problems and incivilities. Civil remedies typically aim to
persuade or coerce non-offending third parties to take responsibility and action to prevent or end
criminal or nuisance behavior. Many civil remedy approaches target non-offending third parties
(e.g. landlords, property owners) and utilize nuisance and drug abatement statutes to control
problems. These types of abatement statutes include repair requirements, fines, padlockdclosing,
and property forfeiture and seek to make owners and landlords maintain drug- and nuisance-free
properties.
The proliferation of civil remedies used to control crime problems began in the
0 mid- 1980s. Several early civil remedy cases captured the attention of the public and law
enforcement community and catapulted the use of civil remedies from relative obscurity to
mainstream crime prevention practices. One early test case involved the Westside Crime
Prevention Association, a group of neighbors in New York City, who in 1986 had exhausted all
traditional avenues to eliminate drug activity at a local crack house. A private attorney, working
pro bono on the association's behalf, filed a lawsuit against the property owner based on a
125-year-old state statute originally enacted to control "bawdy houses" (Le., prostitution
establishments). The statute defined a nuisance property as any real property used for "illegal
trade, business, or manufacture," and outlined civil sanctions (up to a $5000 penalty) that a
property owner could face if the owner "does not in good faith diligently" move to evict the
tenant (Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law, Section 715). The neighborhood
1
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
association won its case: the tenant was evicted, the house was sold, and the legal costs of the
0 association were paid from the proceeds. The "bawdy house" statute is now used in similar
situations by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
Another early pioneer in civil remedies was Portland, Oregon's Office of Neighborhood
Associations, which helped enact a municipal drug house ordinance in 1987 enabling the city to
impose civil penalties on owners of properties used for drug dealing; within a month of the
ordinance's enactment, twelve civil suits against property owners were filed (Davis and Lurigio,
1996). Rather than needing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime'had been committed,
the civil suits were simply predicated on evidence that a drug nuisance existed2.
One reason behind the rapid development and acceptance of civil remedies to prevent and
control crime is the recognition that criminal remedies -- arrest, prosecution, and incarceration --
0 often fail to resolve the problem, even in the short-term, and especially in the long-term (Moore
and Kleiman, 1989; Sherman, 1990; Uchida, Forst, and Annan, 1990). For example, a drug
dealer may continue to deal while out on bail and on probation; if he or she is jailed, another is
likely to quickly take his or her place. A motel which harbors drug use and prostitution with a
long history of vice arrests is likely to persist unless there are changes in the management of the
motel.
Unlike traditional criminal sanctions, civil remedies attempt to resolve underlying
problems: the motel's poor management, the absentee owner's neglect. The use of civil remedies
tends to be proactive and oriented toward prevention (Hansen, 1991, National Crime Prevention
Ironically, the case is often made that a drug nuisance problem exists by virtue of a
history of vice arrests at the property.
a 2
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a Council, 1996) while, at the same time, civil remedies aim to enhance the quality of life
(Rosenbaum, Bennett, Lindsay, Wilkinson, Davis, Taranowski and Lavrakas, 1992) and .
eliminate opportunities for problems to occur or reappear (Feldman and Trapp, 1990; National
Crime Prevention Council, 1992). A number of civil remedy approaches move beyond coercing
and pressuring owners to evict, renovate, repair, and clean up their properties: and also provide
training and assistance to the ownerllandlord to prevent his or her other properties fiom
becoming places with crime problems (Green, 1996; Skogan and Hartnett, 1997).
Civil remedies offer an attractive alternative to criminal remedies since they are relatively
inexpensive and easy to implement (Davis and Lurigio, 1996). Citizens can make a difference by
documenting probl&s, pressuring police and prosecutors to take appropriate civil action, or
spearheading drives to establish usehl local ordinances (Davis, Smith, Lurigio and Skogan,
1991). A group of neighbors can pursue a nuisance abatement action in small claims court
without the assistance of police or public prosecutors (Roehl, Wong, and Andrews, 1997).
Moreover, civil laws require a lower burden of proof than criminal actions and loosen the
requirements of due process, making them easier to appIy yet open to concerns about fairness
and equity (Cheh, 1991).
Oakland's Beat Health program is an example of a civil remedy program. The Beat
Health program seeks to control drug and disorder problems and restore order by focusing on the
physical decay conditions of targeted commercial establishments, private homes, and rental
properties. Police work with teams of city agency representatives to inspect drug nuisance
properties, coerce landowners to clean up blighted properties, post "no trespassing" signs,
enforce civil law codes and municipal regulatory rules, and initiate court proceedings against
0 3
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a property owners who fail to comply with civil law citations. While the ultimate targets of the
Beat Health program are offending individuals living or socializing in target “zones,” the
proximate targets of the program include landlords, business owners, and private property
OWnerS.
This final report to the National Institute of Justice reports the results of a randomized
field trial that sought to assess the impact of the Beat Health program on drug and disorder
problems. In our study, fifty street blocks were randomly assigned to the Oakland Police
Department’s civil remedy program (“Beat Health”) and the other fifly street blocks w r
ee
randomly assigned to the general patrol division. The general patrol division officers, who
targeted the fifty control sites, continued to conduct surveillances and make arrests in the fifty
control street blocks.
a u
O r final report is divided into eight chapters: Chapter Two describes Oakland as our
research site; Chapter Three describes the Beat Health Program; Chapter Four presents our
evaluation design; Chapter Five reports our key findings drawing from the police calls for service
system; Chapter Six reports our findings from a series of on-site assessments conducted before
and after the field trial; Chapter Seven examines our results from a survey of place managers
living and working in and around the 100 street blocks in our study; and Chapter Eight concludes
our report with a discussion of the main findings and policy implications.
4
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER TWO:
OAKLAND AS THE RESEARCH SITE
Oakland is the eighth largest city in California (State of California, Department of
Finance, 1996). The 1990 census data indicate that there are 372,242 people living Within the
53.8 square miles of the city. Oakland lies across a bay to the east of San Francisco. The city is
ethnically diverse, with about 45 percent of the population being Afiican American, about 15 .
percent white and over one third Asian community. Since the 1960's the average household size
has been steadily dropping and there is now an average of 2.34 persons per household. The
median income for residents of Oakland is about $20,000 per year and more than 16 percent of
families live below the poverty line. During the early 1980's, Oakland experienced severe levels
of unemployment, which reached 12.9 percent in 1982 (see Appendix A for a series of thematic
0 maps of Oakland).
The city of Oakland has over 140,000 housing units of which more than 50 percent are
rented. In 1989 the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $560 per month, representing a
twelve percent increase in rents since 1985. Most of the housing units in Oakland are single
family homes, reflecting a style of housing common throughout the west coast of the United
States. As with other cities in the United States, the city of Oakland experienced a large increase
in real estate prices during the mid-eighties. By the 1990's, however, the cost of purchasing
property had declined and the median sale price of an Oakland home was about $185,000
(Oakland Office of Community Development, 1992).
5
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER THREE:
OAKLAND'S BEAT HEALTH PROGRAM
The Oakland Police Department created the "Beat Health Unit" in October 1988 and
mandated the unit to reduce drug and disorder problems across the five police beats in the city.
Five Beat Health teams, each comprising one uniformed officer and a police service technician,
provide services throughout the City of Oakland. Beat Health police officers, working in
conjunction with their partner police service technicians, "open" a case after making a
preliminary site visit to a place that has generated emergency calls, a number of narcotics arrests,
or special requests from community groups for police assistance. Police begin the Beat Health
process by visiting nuisance locations and establishing working relationships with place
managers or with those people who are thought to have a stake i improving the conditions of a
n
0 target location (see Eck, 1994; Felson, 1995a). These place managers are typically homeowners,
apartment superintendents, landlords, and business owners living or working at the target address
or in the immediate surroundings (the street block). During the early stages of the intervention,
police communicate landlords' rights and tenants' responsibiIities, provide ideas for simple crime
prevention measures, and gain the citizens' confidence that the police are supporting them in their
efforts to clean up the problem location.
Beat Health officers also coordinate site visits by the Specialized Multi-Agency Response
Team (SMART) that comprises a group of city inspectors. Depending on preliminary
assessments made by the police, representatives from agencies such as Housing, Fire, Public
a
Works, Pacific G s and Electric, and Vector Control (a government agency that deals with rodent
infestations) are invited to inspect a problem location and, where necessary, enforce local
6
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a housing, fire, and safety codes. About half of all targeted locations have SMART inspections and
about two-thirds of the targeted sites are cited for at least one code violation from a city
inspector: the most common type is a housing code violation.
The police department also draws upon its in-house legal expertise and, as needed, uses a
variety of civil laws3to bring suit against the owners of properties with drug problems. For
example, the Uniform Controlled Substances Act makes every building where drug use occurs a
nuisance, thus allowing the city to use the civil law to eliminate the problem by fining the owner
or by closing or selling the property. About two percent of cases result in formal court action
against a property owner.
For example, Section 11570 of the California Health and Safety Code states: "Every
building or place used for the purpose of unlawfully selling, serving, storing, keeping,
manufacturing, or giving away any controlled substance, precursor or analog specified in this
division, and every building or place wherein or upon which those acts take place, is a nuisance
which shall be enjoined, abated and prevented, and for which damages may be recovered,
whether it is a public or a private nuisance."
In addition, Section 11366.5 (a) stipulates that persons managing or controlling a building
who allows the unlawfbl manufacturing, storing, or distributing of any controlled substance can
be imprisoned for up to one year.
Some of the local municipal codes that are enforced include obstructions (6-1.09),
building constituting a menace to public safety (2-4.09), unnecessary noises (3-1.Ol), unsecured
buildings (2-4.09), and dumping garbage (4-5.12).
0 7
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER FOUR:
RESEARCH METHODS
The goal of our research was to assess the impact of the Beat Health Program, under
experimental field trial conditions, on 100 street blocks in Oakland, California. Street blocks
were eligible for inclusion in our study when a “place” on the block (a residential or commercial
property) was referred to the Beat Health Unit as having a drug andor blight problem. Cases
were referred to the Beat Health Unit via hotline calls, community meetings, and periodic
examination of narcotics calls for service and vice arrests. Existing Beat Health locations, old
Beat Health locations, locations typically not targeted by Beat Health (e.g., Section 8 housing
sites), places that had already been targeted by the patrol division, and places that were deemed
an “imminent danger” (e.g., child abuse problems evident at the site) were not included in the
study for random allocation. Apart from these non-eligible places, all problems sites that were
referred to the Beat Health Unit from October 15,1995 through to December 15,1995 were
included in the study.
The Beat Health Unit targets about 330 cases every year of which about fourteen percent
are commercial properties and the rest are residential properties (see Green, 1996). To enable
close examination of the impact of Beat Health on residential and commercial properties, we
used a blocked randomized experimental design by assigning commercial properties to one block
and residential properties into a second block. We randomized cases in the study within
statistical blocks because we believed there was substantial differences between drug dealing
activities at commercial and residential properties (see Green, 1996). Randomized block designs,
which allocate cases randomly within pairs or groups, minimize the effects of variability on a
8
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a study by ensuring that like cases are compared with one another (see Lipsey, 1990; Neter,
Wasserman, and Kutner, 1990; Weisburd, 1993) There are two basic advantages of using a block
randomized design: first, computations with randomized block designs are simpler than those
with covariance analysis, and second, randomized block designs are essentially fiee of
assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the blocking variable and the dependent
variable, while covariance analysis assumes a definite form of relationship. A drawback of
rimdomized block designs is that somewhat fewer degrees of freedom are available for
experimental error than with covariance analysis for a completely randomized design (Neter,
Wasserman, and Kutner, 1990).
All cases eligible for randomization were plotted on a computerized map of Oakland. If
an incoming case fell within a 300 foot radius (about one street block) of a case already randomly
allocated, the case was withheld and not allocated to either the patrol division (control group) or
the Beat Health Unit (experimental group). This case selection criteria allowed for an
uncontaminated examination of the effects of the experimental and control treatments on each
street block without fear of direct proximal contamination fiom a nearby site. As such, this
design allowed for an analysis of street block activity fiee of some of the confounding problems
that arise with overlapping catchment areas and duplicate cases that could potentially bias the
evaluation results (for a discussion of these issues, see Green, 1995).
While a larger catchment area radius than 300 feet would have been better (indeed the
larger the uncontaminated catchment area the better) the realities of withholding cases fkom
intervention raises ethical considerations. By using the 300 foot criteria, we sought to both
minimize the ethical problems of withholding cases while still maintaining our ability to assess
the street block effects of the interventions without proximal overlap.
0 9
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a Incoming cases were also verified as being either commercial or residential properties.
Residential properties were allocated within the “residential block” and commercial properties
were randomly allocated to the control or experimental treatment within the ‘‘commercial block.”
Cases randomly allocated to the control condition (uniformed patrol response) were referred to
beat officers through an established “beat binder” system. These beat binders were simply a
folder kept in each patrol car that included places that either community service officers or
supervising officers requested beat officers pay attention to. During the intervention phase of our
experiment we added control-allocated cases to these beat binders. By mid- December 1995, the
Beat Health Unit was targeting 50 sites (7 commercial and 43 residential) and the patrol division
was targeting 50 sites (7 commercial and 43 residential). Figure 1 (over page) depicts a map of
the 100 study sites in our study.
a The study sites came to the attention of the Beat Health Unit in roughly three ways:
Nearly half of all study cases came to the attention to the Beat Health Unit as a “goldenrod” h m
known individuals in the community (48 percent); about a quarter of the cases were referred
anonymously through drug hotline calls; and another quarter were identified through hot spot
searches of places with high numbers of vice and drug arrests over the previous six months.
10
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Description of the Experimental and Control Sites
Most of the study sites were rental properties (77 percent) and twelve of the experimental
sites and eleven of the control sites were owner-occupied. Of the dozen owner-occupied
experimental sites, ten involved problems with relatives of the owner; the most typical situation
was when the children or grandchildren of an elderly owner were involved in drug dealing. At
one experimental location, the problem was the owner. Ten of the experimental sites and seven
o'fthe control sites were completely or partially vacant.
Drug dealing was reported as a major problem prior to the start of the experiment in
approximately three-quarters of the locations in both groups. Other problems in the experimental
sites included drug use (n = 14), blight (n = 14), and nuisance problems such as noise and
unkempt yards (n = 7). Of the control sites, 36 recorded drug dealing problems, followed by
blight (n = 1l), other criminal offenses (n = 6), drug use (n = 4), and nuisance problems (n = 4).
Other complaints included rat and roach infestations, prostitution, trespassing, problems with pit
bulls and/or other animals, and other health and welfare issues.
Beat Health Interventions in Experimental Sites
Beat Health oficers personally visited all but two of the fifty experimental sites. Of the
two properties not visited, one was owned by an individual known to the Beat Health team and
contact was made by warning letter and telephone calls. The other property was not visited, but
the owner was sent a warning letter. For the other 48 experimental sites, Beat Health officers
made an initial visit to the target site to confirm the nature of the problem. The officers checked
out the condition of the property fiom the outside, particularly if trash, blight, hazards, or animal
problems were reported. In 35 of the 50 experimental locations, the Beat Health officers talked to
a 12
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e the property owner in person or by telephone. Contact was also made with tenants, neighbors,
and owners/managers to discuss problems at the target locations. These initial activities by Beat
Health officers constitute the primary efforts made by the police to build working relationships
with place managers in the experimental sites. Beat Health officers use the knowledge gained by
the initial visit and the degree of cooperation exhibited by the owner to guide subsequent steps in
the Beat Health problem solving process. .
The Beat Health approach uses a variety of tactics to resolve drug and disorder problems.
In many cases, the Beat Health teams aim to establish working relationships with property
owners, on-site managers, and business owners in an effort to enlist their help in solving the
problems reported. Officers make suggestions for increasing security, make referrals to city
agencies for assistance, communicate legal ordinances and safety codes relative to particular
problems, encourage owners to fix up and clean properties without the pressure of a formal
citations, and support the owners in the prevention and intervention efforts. The Beat Health
officers and Police Service Technicians often contact owners or other responsible parties several
times during the intervention period to make sure the problems are mitigated. The Beat Health
Unit also offers training to landlords and owners in tenant screening and effective management
of rented properties.
In the 50 experimental sites, a substantial amount of the intervention activity involved a
combination of working with and pressuring third parties (primarily owners, parents of grown
children, and property managers) to make positive changes. Most of the contact with place
managers was for the purpose of gathering information, although in a few sites, place managers
were directly involved in the problem-solving interventions. In one commercial location, for
a 13
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
example, the Beat Health officer put the property owner in touch with a community organization
0 and other nearby merchants. The community organization subsequently met with the owner to
discuss possible solutions to the loitering, trash, and suspected drug problems on his property. In
another particularly troublesome residential location, Beat Health interventions (e.g., a SMART
inspection, working with the owner, warning, letters, eviction, etc.) and traditional surveillance
and undercover interventions were combined with neighborhood organizing and clean-up efforts.
These neighborhood-based efforts were coordinated by a civilian Neighborhood Service
Coordinator who also worked closely with the Beat Health teams.
Other formal actions taken by Beat Health officers at the experimental sites included
SMART inspections (n = 23), sending general warning letters (n = 9),sending 11570 warning
letters (n = 13), issuing beat orders (n = 9), working with property owners to evict troublesome
tenants (n = 19), and property clean-ups. These actions short of SMART inspections involve the
following:
Letters to owners. Warning letters from the Beat Health officer or sergeant inform the
owner that complaints of problem activities (e.g., drug dealing) have been reported on
their property, advise the owner of steps he or she might take to prevent or minimize the
problems, and offer assistance in resolving the problem. "1 1570" letters make reference
to the primary civil statute used in the Beat Health approach. These letters are sent to
owners of property where a drug arrest has occurred, and inform the owner of Section
11570 of the California Health and Safety Code (also known as The Drug Nuisance
Abatement Act), which holds owners and managers responsible for knowingly allowing
illicit drug activity to occur on their property. The letters also reference Section 11366.5
14
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
(a), which states that criminal actions may be taken as well. The letters serve as official
notice of drug activity and a copy is forwarded to the city attorney. The owner is
encouraged to call a specific Beat Health officer for assistance in eliminating the
problem.
Eviction. In addition to the 19 evictions in experimental sites, in several other cases the
problem was resolved when the tenant(s) moved out without eviction orders. The Beat
Health Unit cannot order or request that tenants be evicted, but they support eviction as a
problem-solving strategy.
Beat orders. Beat orders notify patrol officers or special units (narcotics, vice, etc.) of the
problems at specific locations and requesting their services be directed to them. The Beat
Health officers also work with these officers on surveillance efforts. Problems related to
liquor stores and bars are typically referred to the Alcohol Beverage Action Team
(ABAT) of the police department as well.
Other interventions include property clean-ups conducted by a city agency (who then
bills the owner for the work) and referrals to agencies (Legal Assistance for Seniors,
subsidized loan programs for rehabilitation efforts, etc.).
During the 23 SMART inspections instigated against experimental target sites, city
inspectors issued nine housing and safety citations, six vector control violations, two sidewalk
citations, and one sewer violation. The individual agencies give owners a certain amount of time
to fix the problem, depending on its severity and the owner's degree of cooperation, and are to
follow up to see if the problem is taken care of (this step is not always followed). Fines and other
civil penalties may occur if violations are not corrected, and there are fees for re-inspections to
a 15
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e cover city costs.
If owners do not correct the problem, the penalties under Section 11570 include fines of
up to $25,000, closure of the property for up to one year, and sale of the property to satisfy city
costs. The city attorney's office files suit against owners who do not take responsibility for their
property after the other Beat Health steps have occurred; none of the experimental locations
reached this stage during the period of our tracking (one year).
16
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER FIVE:
CALLS FOR SERVICE
Calls for police service comprise a common source of outcome information for many
police interventions (see Sherman, Shaw and Rogan, 1995; Sherman and Weisburd, 1995;
Warner and Pierce, 1993; Weisburd and Green, 1995). Indeed, Sherman and his colleagues argue
that calls for police service “provide the widest ongoing data collection net for c r h h a l events in.
the city’’ (Sherman, Gartin and Buerger, 1989:35). Similarly, Warner and Pierce argue that calls
for service data are biased only by citizens’ willingness to report crimes” (Warner and Pierce,
19935 12).
Researchers who use calls for service data, however, are not without their critics. Klinger
and Bridges (1997), for example, argue that calls for service are biased because they do not
include crimes that come to police attention through means other than police dispatch centers;
because callers can provide misleading information (see also Reiss, 1971); and because they
consist of what police call-takersrecord about what citizens tell them (see also Gilsinan, 1989).
Overall, Klinger and Bridges (1997) identi@ three types of error in calls for service crime counts:
calls identified as noncriminal events that are in fact criminal activity (false negatives), callers
that classify noncriminal behavior as criminal (false positives), and calls that misclassify the
nature of criminal incidents (crime misclassification). They conclude that calls for service data
undercounts the amount of crime officers encounter on patrol (by about 23 percent), that the
undercounting varies by crime type (overcounts burglary by about 3 percent and undercounts
trespassing by about 5 1 percent), and that errors in calls for service crime counts vary
systematically across space (1997:719-720).
a 17
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Klinger and Bridges’ (1997) analysis of the limitations with calls for service information
stems from data gathered for the Police Services Study (PSS) in 1977 where initial codes for
police dispatches were compared to observer codes about each encounter. We contend, however,
that several current factors challenge the basis of Klinger and Bridges’ criticisms of calls for
service data. First, we suggest that more (rather than less) people these days opt to call the
emergency 9- 1-1 number rather than local police numbers, despite efforts by police to encourage
citizens to call 9-1-1 only in emergency situations. Recent initiatives underway in most large
cities to establish non-emergency number systems are testament to the overuse problem of 9- 1-1
systems. Klinger and Bridges (1997) argue that calls for service severely under-count crimes in
communities. We suggest that the undercounting problem using the Oakland CAD data may not
be as severe as what Klinger and Bridges find in their research.
0 Second, CAD systems these days often serve as police “switchboards” where non-
emergency calls (or information calls) are received by the emergency call takers and then
subsequently re-directed (see also Scott, 1981). As such, CAD systems capture a vast array of
information about issues faced by citizens. Finally, our analysis uses calls for service data under
randomized field trial conditions. As such, in our type of analysis, we would expect that any
biases in the CAD data (either over-counting or under-counting) would be randomly distributed
between the control and experimental sites. For these three reasons, we contend that our use of
calls for service information to be a reasonable measure of changes in drug and disorder
conditions in the 100 test sites in our study.
Calls for Service Data
We examine all calls for service records from January 1994 through March 1997 (39
18
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e months) downloaded from the Oakland Police Department Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD)
system (n = 7,163,071). All types of communications are stored as CAD records in the Oakland
calls records management system including calls for service fiom citizens to the police; patrol
officers logging in and out of the system; call takers and dispatchers logging in and out of the
system; patrol officers informing central dispatch of their field status (e.g. when they go “offthe
air” for lunch or dinner; when they meet upwith a citizen; when they make requests to call a
fellow officer; when they notify superiors of field conditions; when they give the time of anival
at a scene) as well as all computer maintenance checks.
The Oakland Police Department CAD system also allows call takers to enter multiple
records about one incident. System technicians state that multiple entries can be recorded for a
single call incident in a number of different situations: (1) when call takers want to quickly
forward the record onto the dispatcher, yet they still want to collect additional information fiom
the caller, the call takers can create multiple records. The more complex the call, the more
serious the event, and the longer the caller is on the phone, the more likely the call taker will
create multiple records for the incident; (2) when police officers report an incident f o the field
im
that provides additional information about a call incident the call takers can create an additional
CAD record and reference the call to the citizen call about the incident; or (3) when the call taker
accidently hits the return key while taking a call, then multiple records will be created. These
types of situations all lead to a new CAD record being started and referenced to the originating
call record.
Given the idiosyncratic nature of the Oakland Police Department CAD system, we knew,
fiom the outset, that we could not use each CAD record as our unit of analysis in our impact
a 19
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
assessment. Indeed, if we had used each CAD record as the unit for analysis we would have
0 greatly inflated the actual number of calls for service. Since the Oakland CAD system provides
no identifier as to what type of situation generated multiple records for one call incident, we
decided to aggregate all call records to what we call the call incident unit of analysis. This
method for handling Oakland’s CAD data was parsimonious and did not force us to make a
decision about call taker actions in creating multiple records. Overall, we aggregated all 7.1
million CAD records to the incident unit of analysis and identified 3,712,209 unique call
incidents.
Of the 3.7 million call incidents examined, nearly 2 million did not contain an address (n
= 1,946,748). On exploring the call codes for these 2 million records we discovered that the vast
majority of these “missing address” records (n = 1,752,073; 90 percent) were for what we
classified as “internal police business” about administrative matters (e.g. computer maintenance,
field calls fiom police about meal breaks, logging in and out of the system, and technician
requests). Of the remaining 10 percent of non-address records, the majority of cases were
identified as system errors (n = 179,101) and the remaining records appeared to be valid calls for
service about crime and quality of life problems (n = 15,574; average of about 400 calls per
month citywide during our study period). About 93 percent of these apparent valid crime calls
were for traffic and vehicle infringements (14,484 of 15,574 call incidents). Conversations with
call takers and system technicians suggest that these types of calls were most likely made by
callers about matters that were not within the jurisdiction of the Oakland Police Department.
In total we examine 1,765,461 call incidents fiom January 1994 to March 1997 in our
impact assessment. Just over 40 percent (40.9 percent) of calls for service incidents examined
20
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e represented one entry about a single incident. Conversely, nearly 60 percent of the calls for
service incidents examined represented multiple entries about the same incident. In total, there
was an average of 2.79 call.records for every one call incident over the 39 months of CAD data
examined (n = 1,765,461). Table 5.1 below summarizes some of the basic information fiom the
call incidents fiom which we draw our analysis.
Table 5.1: Summary of Call Incidents (January 1994 to March 1997)
N Percent
(n = 1,765,461)
Selected Call T n e sS
Violent 100,825 5.7
Property * 80,957 4.6
Disorder 342,658 19.4
Drugs 49,9 18 2.8
Priority Level
A Imminent 55,121 3.1
0 B. Urgent
C. No Cover Needed
829,417
769,679
47.0
43.6
D. Non-Emergency Assignments 111,244 6.3
Before Intervention (1/1/94 - 10/15/95) 994,321 56.3
During Intervention (10/16/95 - 3/31/96) 240,465 13.6
After Intervention (411196 - 3/31/97) 530,675 30.1
Locatio-ation
Geocodable Address 1,66 1,461 94.1
In Study Catchment Zone 59,489 3.4
At Study Target 3,102 0.2
Violent crimes include homicide, murder, rape, assault, robbery, weapons offenses,
domestic abuse, threatening calls, stalking. Property crimes include arson, burglary, theft and
malicious mischief. Disorder includes trespassing, suspicious persons, littering, public morals,
disturbing the peace, drunk/disorderly behavior, city service problems, and abandoned cars.
Other call types not reported here included traffic offenses, alarms, citizen requests for
information, civil matters, administrative calls, warrants, animal control and security checks.
0 21
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a As this table shows, the “before” period includes all calls from January 1, 1994 to
October 15, 1995 (2 1.5 months), the “during” period includes all calls from October 16, 1995
through March 3 1, 1996 (5.5 months) and the “after” period includes all calls fiom April 1,1996
through March 3 1, 1997 (12 months). We examine a total of 1,765,461 call incidents that were
received by the Oakland Police Department fiom January 1 1994 to March 31,1997. Of these
call incidents, 94.1 percent were “geocodable.” Non-geocodable cases included calls with invalid
addresses (e.g. “intersections” given with streets that do not meet, addresses that do not exist on
the given street, major mis-spellings of streets that our cleaning programs could not decipher the
street name). A total of 3.4 percent of all call incidents fell within the 300 foot buffer zones that
surrounded our 100 target sites. Less than one percent (0.2%) were geocoded to the target
location. Nearly three percent of all call incidents citywide were for drugs and nearly 20 percent
of call incidents were about disorder incidents.
Citywide Changes
Table 5.2 below presents the mean number of selected calls for service incidents per
month as well as the percent change for the pre and post intervention periods and comparing the
citywide and the study sites (experimental and control sites together).
22
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e Table 5.2: Percent Change and Mean Number of Selected Call Incidents Per Month Pre
and Post Intervention Citywide Compared to All Study Sites
Citywide Study Sites
Call Type Before After YOChange Before After YOChange
Violent Crime 2617.9 2565.4 -2.0% 121.4 120.8 -.05%
Property Crime 2303.5 1726.3 -25.1% 101.3 78.5 -22.5%
JmP 1280.4 1295.3 +1.2% 71.4 104.4 +46.2%
Disorder 9019.6 8639.9 -4.2% 407.6 442.2 +8.5%
As this table shows, the number of calls for service incidents about violent and property
crimes in the study sites changed in very similar ways to changes in calls for service incidents for
these types of crimes citywide: the percent change in calls for service incidents both citywide as
well as in our study sites declined for violent and property crimes calls. Citizen calls about drug
and disorder incidents, by contrast, increased significantly in the study sites (by nearly 50 percent
for drug incidents and by 8.5 percent for disorder incidents), yet declined slightly citywide
(decrease ofjust one percent for drug incidents and by 4.2 percent for disorder incidents). We
explore the nature of these changes in the following section.
Leaving Out the Intervention Period from the Analysis
Ow analysis of the effects of the experimental intervention compares calls for service
incidents during the 2 1.5 months prior to the start of the experiment (pre-intervention) to the
twelve months after the completion of the intervention period (post-intervention). We do not use
the intervention period in our analysis because we were concerned that the calls for service data
could be influenced by the interventions themselves. We suspect that calls for service during the
23
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e intervention period could be influenced by both the experimental and control treatments in
several different ways: first, in the Beat Health sites, police sought to build problem-solving
partnerships with residents and business owners living or working on the target street blocks (see
Chapter Three and Seven). We expect that citizen contacts with police increased somewhat in
response to these partnership building efforts (see Green, 1996; Weisburd and Green, 1995) and
that possibly a number of calls for police service were made directly to Beat Health officers
working on the target street block problems rather than to the emergency call number, second,
residents in the control sites may have increased their calls for service to the police emergency 9-
1-1 system, particularly if patrol officers encouraged citizens to call the police emergency
number about problems on their street blocks (see Chapter Seven). The former scenario would
lead to an aggregate decline in calls for service recorded by the 9-1-1 system while the latter
0 scenario would lead to an aggregate increase in calls for service incidents recorded by the 9-1-1
system6. Table 5 3 below summarizes the changes in calls for service for the before to during
.
periods of our field trial for selected call types.
Table 5.3 Before and During Beat Health Intervention Comparisons for Selected Call
Types for Citywide, Experimental, and Control Areas
Emenmental control City Wide
€auYIE
Drugs small decline big increase small decline
Disorder decline increase decline
Violent no change no change no change
Property no change no change small decline
We explore the relative impacts of solo actions (e.g. calling 9-1-1) versus collective
problem-solving actions (e.g. working with a Beat Health officer to solve a problem) on drug and
disorder problems in Chapter Seven.
a 24
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
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a During the five and a half month intervention period, calls for service incidents about
drug offenses averaged about 24 calls per month in the experimental sites (slight decrease fiom
the pre-intervention period) compared to nearly 60 calls per month during the intervention period
in the control sites (large increase f o the pre-intervention period). By contrast, the citywide
rm
monthly averages about drug incidents during the intervention time period declined slightly f o
rm
the before period to the during period. Calls. about disorder incidents followed a similar pattern to
the calls for drug incidents both citywide and at the study sites: we observed declines in the
monthly averages of disorder incidents in the experimental sites and across the city when the
before period was compared to the during period. By contrast, we observed increases in disorder
calls in the control sites when the before period was compared to the during period. Calls for
service about violent and property crimes remained fairly stable throughout the study period @re,
0 during and post periods) averaging about 5 1 calls per month for violent crime incidents and 46
calls for property crimes in the experimental study sites and about 59 calls per month for violent
crime incidents and 48 calls per month for property incidents in the control sites. Overall, we
suspect some instability and program contamination with the citizen calls for police service
during the intervention period, particularly for drug and disorder call incidents. As such we do
not use the data from the intervention period in our analysis.
Main Effects of the Experimental Intervention
u
O r analysis uses residual gain scores (or residual change scores) to measure the impact
of our interventions at the study sites. For each crime call category examined (violent, property,
drugs and disorder) the raw pre-intervention score (“before”) was regressed onto the raw post-
intervention score (“after”) to generate a residual gain score (see Bohmstedt, 1969; Bursik and
a 9<
LJ
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a Webb 1982; Cronbach and Furby, 1970) and thus enable analysis of the amount of change
occurring during the course of the intervention. This procedure allows us to identi@ changes in
calls for service such that positive (or greater) scores of a “difference” variable indicates more
calls than expected after the intervention and negative (or lower) scores of a “difference” variable
indicate less calls than expected after the intervention. Bursik (1986) explains “....that since this
score represents the difference between the level of a variable at time t and the level that was
predicted on the basis of time t-1 the measure is automatically corrected for ongoing pattems
that characterize the study sites: that is it represents the changes that were unexpdted given the
prior ecological conditions of the [street block]” (Bursik, 1986:43).
Table 5.4 presents the mean change in the number of calls for service incidents within the
experimental (Beat Health) and control (Patrol) groups comparing the pre and post intervention
periods. We also present the statistical significance of the differences in the residual gain scores
between the experimental and control groups using an ANOVA method of analysis taking into
account the direct effects of type (experimental versus control) and block (commercial versus
residential) as well as the interactions between “type” and We provide analysis for four
categories of calls for service incidents: violent, property, disorder, and drugs (see footnote 5 for
explanations of what call incidents are included in these categories). We use the street block as
our unit of analysis in this first presentation of our results and our analysis of the effects of the
We decomposed the sums of squares by assessing each type of effect separately where
the main effects of the factors were assessed first and then the two way interactions (between
block and type) second. The effects within each type were adjusted for all other effects in that
type and also for the effects of all prior types (see SPSS-X User’s Guide, Third Edition: pages
369-374).
a 26
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
a experimental intervention compares calls for service incidents during the 2 1.5 months prior to the
start of the experiment (pre-intervention) to the twelve months after the completion of the
intervention period (post-intervention)*.
Table 5.4: Mean Changes in Calls for Service Incidents, Pre Versus Post Intervention
Periods (by Call Type) with Street Blocks as the Unit of Analysis
Groua
Call TvDe Experimental Control Grour,Block
Before After & Before After E D-
Violent 59.72 60.00 + 0.5 61.72 60.83 - 1.4 .868 .054**
Property 49.30 37.75 -23.4 52.00 40.75 -21.6 -610 .673
Drugs 26.51 29.67 +11.9 44.93 74.75 +66.4 .093** .079**
Disorder 207.07 214.58 +3.6 219.16 227.58 +3.8 .789 .231
*** p < .01 (one tailed test)
** pc.05 (one tailed test)
* p < .10 (one tailed test)
As this table shows, there were no significant differences between the experimental and
a control groups for violent, property, or disorder call incidents when the before period was
compared to the after period. Our results reveal, however, significant differences in the number
of call incidents per month when the experimental sites were compared to the control sites for
*
We also examined the results when just twelve months (rather than 21.5 months) were
examined prior to the start of the experiment. We also examined a six month pre-intervention
period compared to a six month post-intervention period to capture any short run effects that
could be hidden with the longer baseline data and the longer follow-up period data. Results of
this analysis suggests that for property calls and drug calls, there were no differences when the
shorter periods were compared to the longer time periods: the drug effect in favor of the
experimental sites remained and there remained no significant differences between experimental
and control sites for property crimes. For disorder and violent crimes call incidents, however, the
control sites appeared to be somewhat better off than the experimental sites when the six month
pre and post time periods were compared. The differences between the control and experimental
groups for disorder call incidents during the six-month analytic period were statistically
significantly in favor of the control sites. The differences were not statistically significant for the
violent crime call comparisons.
0 27
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
changes in drug call incidents. While calls about drug incidents increased for both groups, the
a experimental group increased by just over 10 percent whereas the control group increased by 66
percent in the mean number of calls per month when the pre-intervention period is compared to
post intervention period. This result was statistically significant at the .05 level (one-tailed test)
and represents less of an increase than expected in the number of calls for drug incidents in the
experiment street blocks.
When the block effects were examined -namely the differences between the
commercial and residential properties -we found significant differences for violent crimes and
drug call incidents. For violent crime call incidents, our results show decreases in both the
control and experimental sites for residential properties, yet increases (especially in the
experimental sites) for commercial properties. For call incidents about drug problems, by
0 contrast, our results show decreases in call incidents at both experimental commercial and
residential properties yet increases in calls about drugs at both residential and commercial control
sites. The increase in drug calls at commercial properties in control sites is especially large.
Table 5.5 presents results of a similar analysis when only the target sites (the addresses of
u
the target sites rather the street blocks) are examined. O r second analysis seeks to examine the
impact of the Beat Health program compared to the patrol division efforts to ameliorate problems
specifically at the location that was the subject of citizen complaints.
28
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Table 5.5: Mean Changes in Calls for Service Incidents, Pre Versus Post Intervention
Periods (by Call Type) with Target Sites Only as the Unit of Analysis
GrouD
I2al.mm Emerimental Control m R Blork
Before After% Before After c9 D-
Violent 4.37 3.58 -22.0 3.26 3.17 -2.8 .540 .042**
Property 2.74 1.58 -
73.3 2.5 1 2.00 -25.6 .487 .734
rg
Dus 1.86 2.33 +25.3 1.77 1.42 -19.8 .492 .739
Disorder 13.12 11.00 -19.2 12.05 11.58 - . .592
40 .005***
*** p .01 (one tailed test)
** pC.05 (one tailed test)
* p .e .10 (one tailed test)
As this table shows, there were no statistically significant differences between the control
and experimental groups when the group effects (either control or experimental) were examined.
These results, however, are unreliable due to the large within group variances (see footnote 9 for
an explanation as to why these results are unstable). Nonetheless, Table 5.5 shows that the
expenmental group mean number of call incidents per month declined for violent crime calls,
property and disorder. Conversely, the number of calls about drug problems at the target site for
the control group showed a large decline compared to the large increase in the experimental
group. The only statistically significant finding when the control and experimental target sites
were examined was between the residential and commercial targets for violent crime call
incidents and disorder calls for service incidents. For both of these call types, there were more
Carekl analysis of the changes in calls for service at the target addresses (especially the
drug calls) reveals that the within group differences are large compared to the between group
differences, creating a small F-ratio. This result makes the analysis somewhat unreliable. Indeed,
when each case was examined, we found that the majority of target sites showed no change in the
number of calls f r service. This problem was not observed in the data at the street block level of
o
analysis.
29
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
calls at the commercial control targets during the after period compared to the before period.
0 Interestingly, we observed statistically significant declines in the mean number of drug
calls in the experimental group compared to the control group when the number of drug call
incidents per month were compared for a 12 month pre and post study period (decrease of 7.6%
in experimental; increase of 35.2% in control) as well as for a six month pre and post study
period (36.9% decrease in experimental; 19.5% increase for control).
’
Overall, the fluctuations in calls for service regarding drug problems at the target
addresses are most likely the result of one possible explanation: the target sites probably
experienced abrupt increases in drug problems during the six month period prior to case selection
for the experiment. When the longer pre-period was examined (21.5 months as opposed to
comparisons based on 12 and 6 month respectively), the seriousness of the problem at the target
sites prior to our intervention period was somewhat masked. We present graphs of the 39 month
0
time series of calls for drug problems at Figures 2 (Street Block) and 3 (Target Site Only) on the
following pages.
30
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of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Figure 2: Number of Drug Calls for Service by Month
for Experimentaland Control Street Blocks
120
100
80
L
e
--tControl
a,
60
P
2
r
0
40
20
0
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Flgure 3: Number of Drug Calls for Service by Month
for Experimentaland Control Target Sites
12
10
L
9
E
Experimental
2
0
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
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As Figure 2 shows, the control street blocks had a higher monthly average of calls about
drug problems prior to the start of the intervention period than the experimental street blocks. As
suspected, however, the number of calls about drug problems began to increase from about
month 11 through to month 21 (start of the experiment), particularly for the experimental blocks.
While the control street blocks show a steady increase over the entire 39 month period, the
experimental street blocks show an abrupt decline at the onset of the experimental treatment,
followed by several months of “containment” and then an increase once again in drug activity
some 14 or 15 months after the start of the intervention period. Figure 3 (Target Site Only)
contrasts with Figure 2 and shows abrupt (as opposed to steady) increases in drug calls
elh
immediately prior to the case coming to the attention of the Beat Hat Unit. These longitudinal
patterns suggests several phenomenon: (1) target sites come to the attention of the Beat Health
a Unit after drug problems have slowly escalated over several months on the street block, (2) the
specific target site is most likely referred to the Beat Health Unit when drug problems have
abruptly escalated in the previous three months, (3) the Beat Health Program seems to directly
impact the escalation of drug problems on target street blocks during the first few months of the
Beat Health intervention, (4) the Beat Health treatment leads to some residual deterrence effects
in keeping drug problems under control for some months after the intervention has concluded but
( 5 ) these gains seem to be lost over the long term.
The declines observed during the six month follow-up period, and to a lesser extent the
twelve month follow-up period, could be attributed to one of two factors: either a regression to
the mean or the effectiveness of the Beat Health program. Given that the improvements at the
street block unit of analysis for changes in drug problems are statistically significant when all
33
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
months are included in the analysis (see Table 5.4), we suggest that the latter explanation -that
the Beat Health program was effective in reducing drug problems -is the most plausible
explanation. We suggest, however, that there may be some regression to the mean contributing to
the observed declines in drug call incidents. Nonetheless, we would expect that the control group
would also experience regression to the mean given that the cases were randomly allocated
between the control and experimental treatments. As such, we conclude that at least part of the
improvements in drug problem conditions on the experimental street blocks can be attributed to
the effectiveness of the Beat Health program.
Displacement and Diffusion Effects of the Experiment
Measuring spatial displacement and diffision offers a unique challenge to evaluators (see
Green, 1995). Generally, evaluators are interested in the direct main effects of an intervention -
e.g did the intervention reduce the problem against the target -before they t r their attention
un
to exploring whether there were any “unintended” results of the intervention (see Weisburd and
Green, 1997). More often than not, if there are “no significant findings” from the main thrust of
the study, evaluators will not take the time to assess whether there was either a displacement or
diffision result. Conversely, when there are “significant findings,” evaluators typically scramble
to find out whether their findings could be nullified if there was a companion displacement effect
as a result of the direct intervention.
ih
The main effects of the Oakland experiment are consistent wt a growing body of
evidence that suggests that police can be effective in controlling drug problems when they use
problem-solving approaches rather than traditional enforcement oriented police tactics (see also
Hope, 1994; Kennedy, 1993; Weisburd and Green, 1995). In addition to assessing the main
34
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
effects of the Beat Health program, however, our study sought to explore the displacement and
diffision effects of the experimental and control treatments.
We contend that efforts to measure the spatial effects of interventions should be designed
with three issues in mind: first, we suggest that evaluators should seek to directly measure the
underlying displacement and diffision processes of the intervention programs; second, we argue
that evaluation designs that seek to assess the direct effects of an intervention may need to be
modified to enable a direct assessment of possible displacement and diffusion effects; and third,
we suggest that more sophisticated methodologies be employed to tease out the spatial patterns
*ofcrime control interventions.
u
O r evaluation of the spatial displacement and diffision effects of the Beat Health
program “designed-in” a capacity to evaluate the effects of the program on 100 uncontaminated
street blocks surrounding the 100 target sites (see Chapter Four). Activity at our 100 target sites
0
as well as in a 300 foot uncontaminated buffer zone surrounding each site was tracked for a
period on twelve months following a five and a half month intervention period. We use calls for
service data (violent crimes, property, drugs and disorder) to examine the various changes in the
target and buffer zone activity comparing the pre-intervention period (21.5 months) to the post-
intervention period (12 months). Table 5.6 presents a summary of the results.
35
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Table 5.6 Number of Study Sites with Changes in Calls for Service by Crime Type and
e Group (Control vs Experiment)
Tarpet Sites
-
Less No Change -
More
C E C E C E
Buffer Zone
Violence 6 7 10 11 5 6
-
Less Property 10 14 16 16 7 2
Drugs 6 5 12 15 1 2
Disorder I1 8 5 3 5 5
Violence 1 1 0 0 0 1
No Change Property 0 1 0 0 0 0
Drugs 0 1 4 6 1 0
Disorder 0 0 0 0 0 0
Violence 8 11 12 11 8 2
-
More Property 3 5 11 9 3 3
rg
Dus 4 2 19 16 3 3
Disorder 11 15 8 10 10 9
This table presents the number of sites by control or experimental group that have more,
less or no change in the number of calls for service incidents pre to post the intervention and by
crime call type (violence, property, drugs, and disorder). Arguably, one could propose that the
study site experienced a diffusion of crime control benefits when both the target site and the
surrounding buffer zone had less crime calls after the intervention. Table 5.6 shows that 14 of the
experimental sites had less property crime calls both at the target as well as in the buffer zone
compared to ten of the control sites that experienced similar declines. Conversely, however, the
control group seems to have performed better for controlling disorder crimes: eleven of the
control sites had fewer disorder calls both at the target and in the buffer zone compared to eight
of the experimental sites that had fewer disorder calls at both units of analysis.
36
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
One could also argue that displacement of crime has occurred when there are either less
or no change in crime call events at the target, yet more in the surrounding buffer zone. Table 5.6
shows that the experimental sites perfomed somewhat worse that the control sites for violence,
property and disorder calls: for these crime call categories more expenmental target sites showed
declines in crime call events whereas the buffer zones showed an increase in crime calls events.
For drug crime calls, by contrast, just two of the experimental target sites had less drug calls at
the site with an accompanying increase in drug calls in the buffer zone. Four of the control target
sites showed a displacement effect for drug calls.
Overall, there were very few differences in the aggregate patterns of change depicting
displacement and diffision of crime control effects when the buffer zones and targets were
examined across crime call types and when the control and experimental groups were compared.
37
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U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER SIX:
ON-SITE OBSERVATIONS
On-site observations of the physical and social conditions of the study street blocks
u
comprise the focus of this chapter. O r research supports and extends prior research that uses on-
site ratings by trained researchers in order to capture the “ecological” changes in the
neighborhood or street. We conducted two on-site observations of each street block as each case
was randomly allocated to either the experimental or control group (before). We then conducted
two observations of each street block five months later (after). Structured observations of routhe
licit activity (e.g., pedestrians, children playing, people coming in and out of businesses), illicit
activity (e.g., drug dealing, loitering, urinating in public), litter, graffiti, trash, traffic, and the
presence of law enforcement and security personnel were made of each face block surrounding
a the 100 problem locations. These observations were conducted during two of four randomly
selected time periods (1 lam to 2pm, 2pm to 5pm, 5pm to 8pm and 8pm and 1lpm), both before
the start of the intervention at each site and again at the end of the intervention period at each site
five months later. Trained observers made 400 on-site visits to the experimental and control sites
(200 before and 200 after).’O
Our decision to conduct two observations per street block per period derived from o w
understanding that street blocks have standing patterns of behavior, or rhythms of recuning
Randomly selected observation periods were generated for the before period. The
lo
“after” period observations then used the same time period allocations per site to ensure
consistency between the before and after observations. On-site observers did not know which
street blocks were in the experimental group and which ones were in the control group. Two
coders entered scores for each block and came to an agreement of the scores to generate the
measures in this study.
38
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behavior and activity, that are somewhat predictable and routine (Taylor, 1988, 1997a). Felson
(1995b) also suggests that activities occur in fairly predictable rhythms where patterns of
behavior are dictated by a host of factors including individual people's working hours, sleeping
times, and recreational times.
On-site observations of social activity can be conducted for either a sample or a census of
a street's activity rhythms. For example, if a street block has a constant standing pattern of
behavior (or just one activity rhythm) across all minutes of an hour, across all hours of a day, and
across all days of a week, then one could reasonably assume that conducting one on-site
observation of social activity at any time of the day and on any day of the week would
adequately capture the true social activity patterns of that street block. In this extreme case, one
could argue that consideration of sampling error is not a concern because one observation would
e be representative of the population of social activity patterns (n = 1) for that street block.
Alternatively, if a street block is characterized by various standing patterns of behavior where,
for example, morning activity is different to afternoon activity which is then different to evening
and nighttime activity, then one could conclude that there are at least four standing patterns of
behavior on that particular street block. 'I In this type of case, the total population of standing
patterns of behavior is quite small (n = 4), and if one were to draw a sample of time periods of
social activity that is quite large (e.g., n = 2) relative to the size of the population of time periods
of social activity (e.g., n = 4), the standard error may not be as problematic as expected (see
Blalock, 1979; see also Rosenbaum and Lavrakas, 1995; Weisburd and Green, 1991). Indeed,
example would assume constant variation of social activity between weekends and
" This
weekdays as well as across the four seasons.
39
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Rosenbaum and Lavrakas (1995:296)conclude that the size of the population is not always
0 associated with the stability of estimates.
We also suggest that the reliability and validity of on-site observations increases as the
unit of analysis decreases. We propose that street blocks and other small units of analysis (e.g.,
hot spots, public housing common areas) have fewer and less complex patterns of street activity
(or standing patterns of behavior) than neighborhoods, communities, or other larger units of
analysis that have more complex and vaned patterns of social behavior. For example, a street
block may have just two standing patterns of behavior, where daytime activity is characterized
by people coming and going from the stores on the block and evening activity is characterized by
drug dealing on the street corners. This kind of predictability in the standing patterns of behavior
on a street block is rarely present for neighborhoods for a number of reasons: the absolute
a number of people frequenting a neighborhood makes it more difficult to anticipate standing
patterns of behavior; the range of land use patterns across a neighborhood (businesses, single
family homes, multi-dwellings) creates more complex rhythms of social activity; and the
diversity of people living and working in neighborhoods leads to more complex and diverse
patterns of social behavior.
Observation Method
We conducted two on-site observations of the 100 street blocks i our study both before
n
the case was assigned to the Beat Health Unit and five months after the start of the Beat Health
intervention.'* The average of the two observations before and after the intervention was used as
l2 The average intervention time for the Beat Health program is five months (see Green,
1996).
40
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
the count of people involved in the various types of activity before and after the intervention. For
example, if two people were observed selling drugs on a target street block during the time
period from 2pm through 5pm before the intervention and four people were observed selling
drugs on the same target street block during the time period fiom 8pm to 1lpm also before the
intervention, then we counted three people as selling drugs before the intervention in that
particular target street block. The raw “before” score was regressed onto the raw “after” score to
generate a residual gain score (see Bohmstedt, 1969; Bursik and Webb 1988; Cronbach and
Furby, 1970) and to enable analysis of the amount of change occurring during the course of the
‘intervention. This procedure allows for identification of changes in a street block characteristic
(e.g., drug dealing, signs of disorder or signs of civil behavior in public places) over and above
what we would expect taking into account the baseline observation. As such, positive (or greater)
a scores of a “difference” variable indicates more than expected of a particular social characteristic
(e.g., more drug dealing) after the intervention and negative (or lower) scores of a “difference”
variable indicate less than-expected of a particular social characteristic after the intervention.
Results
Table 6.1 presents the mean number of people engaged in a variety of licit activity (e.g.
supervised children playing, pedestrians, people at bus stops) and illicit activity (e.g. people
selling drugs, people loitering, intoxicated people) both before and after the experiment and in
the experimental and control locations. We also present the mean scores (before and after) of
observed physical disordeP as well as the presence of police and other security personnel
l3 The physical disorder scale was constructed by adding together a series of ordinal
scales of observed physical decay. The scales ranged from 1 (almost none) to 4 (almost
41
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
observed on the study blocks before and after the experiment. We display the statistical
significance of the differences (using residual gain scores) between the experimental and control
conditions, accounting for the block-randomized design of the studyI4.
Table 6.1: Changes in Social Activity and Physical Disorder (per street block), Pre Versus
Post Intervention Periods (by group)
Dependent Variables Experimental ' Control P'
(Means) Before After Before After (trPd
supervised kids playing 0.32 0.22 0.26 0.10 0.366
(private yard, street, school yard)
unsupervised kids playing 0.02 0.36 0.30 0.26 0.26 1
(private yard, street)
adult males general activity 1.70 2.08 1.68 2.28 0.565
(stopping to talk, pedestrians,
inlout of businesses)
adult females general activity 0.92 1.44 1.14 1.24 0.202
(stopping to talk,pedestrians,
idout of businesses)
males & females on bicycles 0.36 0.36 0.28 0.28 0.585
(adult & youth)
males at bus stops 0.06 0.08 0.04 0.00 0.006*
femalesat bus stops 0.06 0.06 0.00 0.00 0.216
males at pay phones 0.02 0.00 0.04 0.06 0.041*
adult males loitering I .28 0.40 1.24 0.60 0.28 I
(by bars, stores & other places)
adult females loiterhg 0.26 0.16 0.30 0.08 0.299
(by bars, stores & other places)
everywhere) and included measures of garbage, litter, broken glass, trash,junk, cigarette butts,
needles, syringes, empty beer or liquor bottles, graffiti. The alpha reliability score for the scale
was .77and the additive measure could range from 4 (hardly any signs of physical decay) to 24
(extensive signs of physical decay).
We used an analysis of variance test by first taking into account the main effects of the
I4
factors (block and type) and then the interactions between block and type to assess statistical
significance in our study.
42
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
male youths loitering- 0.44 0.40 0.58 0.36 0.815
(by bars, stores & other places)
female youths loitering 0.12 0.04 0.06 0.10 0.210
(by stores & otha places)
males with boom boxes, 0.20 0.04 0.14 0.14 0.103
homeless, or drinking
females drinking 0.08 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.283
males selling drugs t 0.06 0.04 0.10 0.44 0.015*
disorder scale (range 4-24) 8.04 . 8.46 8.04 9.18 0.020*
higher valuemore disorder
police/security present 0.00 0.08 0.12 0.16 0.261
*p<0.05 (two tailed test)
tNo females were observed selling drugs.
The key findings from Table 6.1 show that four conditions (males selling drugsts, signs of
physical disorder, males at pay phones and males at bus stops) were statistically significant at the
.05 level. As the table shows, the mean number of males selling drugs on the experimental street
0 blocks went from .06 (or 3 people) before the intervention to .04 (2 people) after the intervention.
For the control street blocks we observed more males selling drugs after the intervention period
(22 people) compared to before the intervention ( 5 people) (p = 0.015).
The differences between the physical disorder conditions of the control and experimental
groups are also statistically significant at the .05 level. As Table 6.1 shows, we find that although
the signs of disorder increased slightly for the experimental group (fiom a score of 8.04 before to
8.46 after), the control group, while starting off with the same score as the experimental group,
increased to a score of 9.184 by the end of the intervention period (p = 0.020).
We did not present females selling drugs because no females were observed selling
Is
drugs either before or after the experiment.
43
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
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U.S. Department of Justice.
Table 6.1 also shows that the mean numbers of pro-social behavior generally increased in
both the control and experimental locations. For example, there were more adult males and adult
females stopping to talk to one another on the street, walking up and down a street, and coming
in and out of businesses both in the experimental and control sites. We also recorded more police
and other security (private, crossing guards) present in both the control and experimental
locations after the intervention period.
In terms of observed anti-social behavior, our on-site observations showed that in the
expenmental street blocks after the experiment there were fewer adult males and females
loitering, fewer youths loitering, fewer males with boom boxes, homeless people and people
drinking in public. These results, however were not statistically significant.
44
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
PLACE MANAGER SURVEY16
This chapter assesses the role of place managers in reducing disorder problems, drug
problems, and signs of incivility. We draw from two data collection efforts: first, a survey of 398
place managers; and second, on-site observations of the social and physical conditions of the 100
u
street blocks i our study (see Chapter Six). O r analysis differs from many other studies of
n
street block activity in that we use both on-site observations and respondent perceptions in ow
research 17. Prior research typically measures street block activity (and changes on street blocks)
using either surveys of residents (see Greenberg and Rohe, 1986; Hirshfield, Brown, and
Bowers, 1996; Rosenbaum and Lavrakas 1995; Taylor et al., 1984) or through on-site
observations (see Taylor 1995a; Taylor 1995b; Taylor 1996a; Taylor 1997b).18
a Place Manager Survey
u
O r first data source utilizes interviews with 398 “place managers” living or working on
the 100 target street blocks in our study at the end of the five-month experimental intervention
periodi9.We define the place managers in our study as those people who live or work near
l6 This chapter is based on a draft of a paper submitted to the National Institute of Justice
in April 1997 and the final version of the paper titled “Controlling Drug and Disorder Problems:
a .
The Role of Place Managers,” forthcoming in W i n o l o q y (May, 1998).
See Perkins and Taylor (1 996) and Taylor (1996b), however, for two studies that did, in
l7
fact, use both on-site assessments as well as resident surveys.
l8 See Taylor (1997a) for an excellent, detailed review of the issues concerning different
methods available for assessing signs of incivility.
l9 Funds were only available to conduct one wave of place manager interviews. As such,
we do not have effective measures of change in the actions, attitudes, and perceptions of place
managers in response to the intervention efforts.
45
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of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
problem places and who, by virtue of their proximity and interests, may have primary or persona1
responsibility to the street block (see Eck and Wartell, forthcoming; Felson, 1995a). The place
managers in our sample included residents (71.4 percent) and managers or owners of stores on
the study blocks (21 percent). The survey sought to examine place manager self-reports of their
specific involvement in controlling the drug problem on their block, the actions they had taken
recently to remedy the problem, their feelings of community cohesion, their perceptions of
security on the street block, their specific assessments of recent police intervention efforts, and
their feelings of fear of crime (see survey instrument at Appendix B).
Our study attempted to include 400 face-to-face interviews at the 100 sites in our study (4
interviews per site). Place managers were selected using the following criteria: we interviewed
residents living on the target blocks who complained about drug activity on the block; owners or
managers of commercial establishments on the block; and school superintendents or other people
working on the block who might have a stake in controlling drug activity on the block. If less
than four people were identified per block using these primary selection criteria, the interviewers
were instructed to interview the residents across the street from the problem location, and
residents on either side of the target location-moving away no hrther than the end of the face
block if no one was home at these residences after four attempts. A total of 398 interviews were
conducted during February and March 1996.
Survey Sample
The place manager respondents were not drawn from a random sample of a population of
place managers. Rather, a purposive sample was utilized in order to better capture how street
blocks were viewed from the perspective of place managers who had a stake in the area, worked
46
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
in the area, or lived in the area (see Rosenbaum and Lavrakas, 1995). The interviewers for the
a study were highly trained census workers on temporary furlough due to a budget stalemate in
Washington DC in early 1996. An on-site supervisor verified each interviewer's first five
interviews and verified 20 percent of their interviews thereafter by calling or visiting the
respondent. Interviewers were not aware of the allocation status (control or experimental) of any
location.
Sample Characteristics
Of the 398 place managers interviewed, nearly half of the respondents were African
'American and 2 1 percent were white; the median number of years living or working at their
current location was about six; 52 percent of the respondents were male; and the mean age of
respondents was 47 years. There were no significant differences between the responses given by
the resident and store owner/manager place managers on measures of place manager
0
demographic characteristics, feelings of fear of crime, and perceptions of cohesiveness. There
were, however, slightly more business store owners or managers who knew about the Beat
Health Program than residents. Business store owners and managers were also more likely to
take their own initiative in solving problems on the block than residents (g < .05).
Sample Characteristics at the Street Block Unit of Analysis
The unit of analysis in our study was the street block. Therefore, the results of the place
manager survey were aggregated by site (n = 100). The aggregated results of the place manager
survey were matched to the results of the on-site assessments of the street blocks (see later) on a
case-by-case basis. Several scales were then constructed from the place manager survey to enable
examination of various theoretical constructs.
47
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Place Manager Individual Action Scale; 2o The items which make up this scale are
presented in Table 7.1. This scale was constructed to capture the specific actions (e.g., calling
91 1) taken by individual place managers against problems at the target location (see Eck, 1994;
Felson, 1995a). In effect, this scale is a measure of those actions taken by individuals in direct
response to anti-social behavior. The scale was included in the analysis .to determine if individual
actions on the part of place managers had an impact on the change in the amount of drug dealing,
the level of disorder, and signs of civil behavior in public places on the street blocks in our study.
Table 7.1: Place Manager Individual Action Scale (N = 398)
Variable Percent
Called 91 1 about the target 15.6
Called the drug hotline about target 12.1
Talked to ownedmanager about problems at the target 7.8
Talked to tenants about problems at the target 8.3
0 Confronted offenders atlabout target 8.8
10.8
Called a city agency about target
Done something on their own about target 8.0
Cronbach ' Alpha: 0.77
s
Place Mmager Cohesiveness Scalei2' The items which make up this scale are presented in
Table 7.2. This scale was designed to represent the reported cohesiveness of the street block and
2o The individual action scale was derived by summing the seven items described in Table
1 and dividing by seven. The scale ranges from 0 to 1 where higher values represent more
individual actions taken on a study block and lower values represent fewer individual actions
taken on a study block.
21 The cohesiveness scale was derived by summing the three items described in Table 2
and dividing by three. The scale ranges from 0 to 1 where higher values represent more
cohesiveness on a study block and lower values represent less cohesiveness on a study block.
48
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
it also reflects a similar construct introduced by Taylor (1996b) which he calls “resistance.”
Other researchers have alluded to this type of measure in arguing that a more cohesive group of
residents will “stick up” for each other and engage in informal social control when the norms of
the street block are being violated (Greenberg and Rohe, 1986; Hirshfield et al., 1996; Sampson
et al., 1997; Taylor, l988,1995a, 1996b; Taylor and Harrell, 1996; Taylor and Gottfi-edson,
1986; Taylor et al., 1984).
Table 7.2: Place Manager Cohesiveness Scale ( = 398)
N
Variable Percent
Believe neighbors on street help each other rather than
go their own way 34.4
Believe neighbors on street will call city to ask for help
dealing with problems 56.6
Believe neighbors will intervene and ask a youth spray
painting grafliti to stop 51.3
Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.81
Place Manager Collective Action Sc& .22 The items which made up this scale are
presented in Table 7.3. This scale was designed to tap into the collective involvement of.
residents and place managers in their community. Buerger (1994) argues that the greatest
challenge of community-oriented policing is to motivate the community to become involved in
partnerships designed to solve community-based problems. This measure was included in the
analysis to determine if place manager involvement in the community had an impact on the
amount of drug dealing and disorder change. The measure was also included to determine if
22 The collective action scale was derived by summing the ten items described in Table 3
and dividing by ten. The scale ranges f?om 0 to 1 where higher values represent more collective
actions taken on a study block and lower values represent fewer collective actions taken on a
study block.
49
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
changes in street conditions were related to the involvement of residents and place managers in
m their street as well as the larger community.
Table 7.3: Place Manager Collective Action Scale (N = 398)
w
Variable Percent
Met with community group about problems 17.6
Attended a community fair 3.3
Attended a drug rally, vigil, or march 1.o
Participated in neighborhood clean-up 8.3
Participated in citizen patrols 1.8
Participated in organized observations of drug activity 4.0
Participated in neighborhood or block watch programs 8.8
Attended landlord training 2.5
Worked with the police about the target 14.8
Worked with community group concerning target 11.8
Cronbach's Aluha = 0.79 '
Fear/Avoidmce Scale:23The items contained in this scale are presented in Table 7.4. This
measure was included in the analysis to determine if fear of crime, which has been found to
restrict the level of resident intervention and alter resident perceptions of their environment
(Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Greenberg and Rohe, 1986; Perkins and Taylor, 1996; Taylor,
1995a, 1996a; Taylor and Hanell, 1996; Taylor et al., 1984), had an impact on the dependent
variables examined. This variable was also added to the analysis to control for its possible
confounding effects on resident perceptions and behavior.
The fear scale was derived by summing the six items described in Table 4 and dividing
23
by six. The scale ranges from 0 to 1 where higher values represent greater levels of fear on a
study block and lower levels represent lower levels of fear on a study block.
50
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
I .
a Table 7.4: FeadAvoidance Scale (N = 398)
Variable Percent
Felt less safe after dark . 28
1.
Felt less safe during the day 38
1.
Never/seldom park on the street 46.5
Neverlseldom walk in the neighborhood 39.9
Neverlseldom visit a neighborhood park 79.4
Neverkeldom talk to neighbors 51
3.
Cronbachs Alpha = 0.66
'
Overall, our survey results show that 2 . percent of all respondents took some type of
39
direct, individual action during the intervention period. The most common type of individual
action taken was calling the police using 91 1 (1 5.6 percent). About 31 9 percent of the residents
.
reported that they were involved in collective community activities: the most common type of
community activity was meeting with a community group (17.6percent). About two-thirds of the
place managers in our sample were fearful of walking alone at night on their block, and only one-
third believed that their neighbors on their street help each other rather than go their own way.
When these frequencies for individual place managers were aggregated to the skeet block
level of analysis (n = loo), we found that 75 percent of the street blocks in our study had at least
one place manager who took some type of direct action during the experimental intervention
period. About half (48 percent) of the street blocks had at least one place manager who reported
calling the police using 91 1. About 73 percent of the street blocks in our study had at least one
'
pIace manager who reported that they were involved in community activities; the most common
type of community activity was meeting with community groups, followed by neighborhood
clean-up projects and neighborhood or block watch activities. The vast majority (90 percent) of
51
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
street blocks in our study had at least one or more place managers who stated they were fearful of
walking alone at night on their block. Seventy-one percent of street blocks had at least one place
manager who believed that most neighbors on the street helped each other rather than going their
own way. Table 7.5 provides summary data of the study variables discussed i this chapter.24
n
Table 7.5: Descriptive Statistics For All Study Variables
Variable Description Mean Std. Dev. Range Skewness ’
Control (0) or Experimental (1) 0.50 0.50 0-1 0.00
Residential (0) or Commercial (1) 0.14 0.35 0- 1 2.11
Fear (scale 0- 1) 0.38 0.15 0-1 0.22
Percent Female 0.48 0.28 0 - 100 0.07
Percent African American 0.45 0.33 0 100 0.16 -
Percent Resident 0.71 0.33 0 - 100 -0.83
Months at Current Location 133.61 84.57 16.25 - 399.00 0.81
Number of Properties on Block 18.11 11.65 3-56 0.24
Collective Action (scale 0 1) -
0.07 0.08 0- 1 1.58
Individual Action (scale 0 - 1) 0.10 0.1 1 0-1 1.90
Cohesiveness (scale 0 1) - 0.47 0.27 0- 1 -0.02
Disorder Scale -0.82 1.99 -5 +4 0.11 -
Drug Dealing -0.16 0.8 1 -4 - +1 -3.15
Public Signs of Civil Behavior -0.3 1 1.47 . -6-+3 -0.89
+‘Measure ofthe asymmetry ofa distribution.Positive skewness indicates that the more extreme values are greater than the
mean and negative skewness indicates that the more extreme values are less than the mean.
24 The multi-collinearity test (tolerance) for the three models presented in this chapter
suggest that the variables are both theoretically as well as empirically distinct constructs. The
correlation matrix can be found at the end of this chapter. Several diagnostics were performed to
ensure the integrity of the three models presented in this paper. First, plots of the standardized
and unstandardized residuals were examined. The plots for the model reporting changes in
disorder reveal no outlier cases. The plots for the model reporting changes in drug activity reveal
two possible outlier cases. All coefficients remain stable when the two possible outliers are
removed fiom the analysis except cohesiveness drops slightly in the level of significance. The
plots for the model reporting changes in civil behavior reveal one possible outlier case. The
model coefficients, however, remain stable when the outlier case is removed. Second, we
examined the Cook’s D statistics for each of the three models included in this paper (analysis for
all 100 cases in the study). The Cook’s D statistics for the disorder model ranged fkom 0 to .136
(mean of .012); the Cook’s D statistics for the drugs model ranged from 0 to .246 (mean of .011);
the Cook’s D statistics for the civil behavior model ranged fkom 0 to .285 (mean of .013)(see
Fox 1991).
52
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Results
To explore the role of place managers in changing levels of drug dealing, signs of
disorder, and signs of civil behavior, several control variables were introduced into the models.
First, dichotomous variables indicating whether the site was a control or experimental site and
whether the site was residential or commercial were introduced to explore whether these
variables had an impact on the change in social activity on the block. These variables were
entered into the analysis to control for the effects of the different interventions that occurred at
the sites (control versus experimental) and any differential impact at commercial versus
.residential locations. We would expect that the expenmental sites, where the Beat Health officers
sought to build working relationships with the place managers, would be predictive of greater
change in the levels of drug and disorder problems than any observed changes at the control
a sites. We also hypothesized that the commercial properties could be impacted more than the
residential properties for two reasons: first, since most of the residential properties were rental
units we expected less change; and second, since the commercial properties were, on average,
more valuable properties we expected the property owners to be more responsive to crime
control efforts (see also Green, 1996)25.
25 The surveys of place managers were conducted for two purposes: (1) to assess the
impact of Beat Health interventions on resident and business representatives' satisfaction with the
block, fear of crime, victimization, and perceived crime and disorder changes at the target site
and (2) to explore the role of place managers on changes in the levels of drug dealing, signs of
disorder, signs of civil behavior, and other outcomes. One way analysis of variance tests found
no differences between the views of place managers at experimental and control sites except as
follows: place managers at control sites questioned at the end of the intervention period were
more likely to report feeling safer during the day and night than were place managers at
experimental sites. Place managers at experimental sites reported more "other" crimes than did
control site place managers. These results were not affected by whether the target sites were
53
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Second, a series of aggregated demographic variables of the place managers on each
a block were introduced into the model to control for any effects related to the gender and racial
mix of the respondents, whether the respondents were primarily residents on the street block or
had businesses on the block, and the average length of time the place managers had lived or
worked on the block. We also controlled for the number of properties on each street block.
We examine the 100 cases in our study to assess the relationships between several
independent variables (e.g., place manager activities, cohesiveness, fear of crime, demographic
characteristics of the place managers identified on the street blocks in our study, number of
properties on the street block) and the outcome variables of disorder, drug activity, and signs of
civility. We expect that those street blocks where place managers perceive high levels of social
cohesion and those blocks with high levels of place manager activity will have greater decreases
residential or commercial. Finally, place managers at control sites were more likely than place
managers at experimental sites to perceive that their block had become a “better place to work or
live”, comparing the end of the intervention period to the beginning, although this result did not
reach statistical significance. We expect that much of the differences between the experimental
analysis of our place manager perceptions and the experimental analysis of our on-site
assessments and calls for service data are a b c t i o n of the different methodologies used to
collect outcome data. Indeed, extensive work employing both surveys of residents and on-site
assessments by trained observers have discovered that residents’ perceptions of disorder and on-
site assessments of disorder may not be measuring the same underlying construct (Perkins and
Taylor 1996; Taylor 1995a, 1995b, 1996% 199%). On-site assessments appear to be measuring
the actual physical conditions of a location, while surveys of residents appear to be capturing the
actuaI conditions of a locations filtered through the various psychological attributes and
psychological processes of residents. In fact, one study by Taylor (1995c) finds that up to 90
percent of the variation in residents’ perceptions of ecological conditions may be psychological
rather than ecological, and that “personal differences contribute more to perceived signs of
incivility than do difference between locations” (Taylor 1995d: 11). In addition, researchers have
theorized that in high disorder neighborhoods, residents may not take notice of changes in
disorder because they are confionted with many troubling or disorderly conditions (Taylor
1997b).
54
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
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in disorder and drugs and greater increases in signs of civility than those places that have weak
place management. The results of the first regression model predicting the observed changes in
signs of disorder 26 are presented in Table 7.6. 27
26 The disorder scale was derived by adding on-site ratings of (a) litter and broken glass,
(b) trash or junk,(b) cigarette butts, (c) needles and drug paraphernalia (d) empty beer or liquor
bottles, and (e) graffiti on the street block. The outcome measure used in this analysis uses
unstandardized residualized difference scores (see Bohmstedt, 1969; Bursik and Webb 1988;
Cronbach and Furby, 1970 ).
*’
Interactions were examined across several key independent variables in our models
(treatment, cohesion, individual actions, collective actions, and fear). None of these interaction
terms were significant for the three models included in this study (both for the models with the
outliers included as well as with the outliers excluded).
55
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Table 7 6 OLS Regression Results for Changes in Signs of Disorder
.:
0 Variable B Standardized B Std Error
Control (0) versus Experimental (1) -0.615* -0.204 0.291
Residential (0) versus Commercial (1) 0.271 0.062 0.509
Fear (scale 0 1) - -0.237 -0.024 1.033
Percent Female 0.294 0.055 0.584
Percent Afiican American -0.408 -0.089 0.505
Percent Resident -0.437 -0.095 0.612
Mean Number of Months at Current Location 0.001 0.049 0.002
Number of Properties on Block 0.032* 0.248 0.014
Collective Action (scale 0 - 1) -7.62 *
1 -0.445 2.113
Individual Action (scale 0 - 1) 4.077* 0.298 1.706
a Cohesiveness (scale 0 - 1) -0.076 0.013 0.616
Constant 0.126 0.763
R Square = .22 Significance of F = .02
* significant at pc.05 (one tailed test)
As this table shows, the variable that is most predictive of change in signs of disorder at
the 100 street blocks i our study was the scaled measure “collective action” (explains 44 percent
n
of variation). As discussed above, this measure was a composite measure of self-reported place
manager involvement in community activism (meeting with community groups, attending drug
rallies, neighborhood clean-ups, citizen patrols, block watch group activities). The more
56
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
collectively involved the place managers reported they were, the greater the observed decreases
in signs of disorder on the street block. Conversely, our results show that the more individual
action taken by the place managers to resolve problems on their block (e.g., calling 91 l), the
more disorder was found after the intervention (pC.05). Interestingly, the more properties on the
block, the less decrease in signs of disorder. We expect that this result is because smaller blocks
could be cleaned up more quickly than larger blocks.
Table 7.6 also shows that the experimental sites had a significantly greater decrease in
signs of disorder than the control sites. Our study does not, however, disentangle which of the
a m y of Beat Health program tactics contributes most to reductions in signs of disorder.
The results of the tobit regression model examining changes in the number of males28
selling drugs29on the target street blocks are presented in Table 7.7. As this table shows, whether
e the site was in the control or experimental group and self-reported levels of community
cohesiveness were significantly more likely to be associated with change in the number of males
selling drugs on the target street blocks.
28 There were no females observed selling drugs either before or after the intervention.
29 The drug dealing measure is a single item measure captured through the social
observations. The drug dealing outcome measure used in this analysis uses unstandardized
residualized difference scores. The drug dealing variable does not exhibit a noma1 distribution.
As one would expect for any type of crime event, there are many blocks where drug dealing’was
not observed (n = 84 blocks did not have any drug dealing observed either before or after the
intervention). As such, Tobit analysis was used for this particular variable because it is
appropriate for restricted (limited) interval-level dependent variables where one value includes a
very large portion of cases (see Baba, 1990; Wooldredge and Winfree, 1992). Indeed, “the Tobit
Model is designed to handle criterion variables that assume some value with a high probability
and are continuously distributed beyond this point with the remaining probabilities” (Baba, 1990:
428). Importantly, using a Tobit analysis did not change the substantive results demonstrated by
using an ordinary least squares model.
57
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U.S. Department of Justice.
e Table 7.7: Tobit Results for Changes in Males Selling Drugs
Variable B Std Error
Control (0) versus Experimental (1) -0.429* 0.149
Residential (0) versus Commercial (1) -0.241 0.26 1
Fear (scale 0 1) - -0.248 0.530
Percent Female 0.252 0.299
Percent African American 0.157 0.259
Percent Resident -0.022 0.314
Mean Number of Months at Current Location 0.000 0.001
Number of Properties on the Block 0.001 0.007
Collective Action (scale 0 1) - 0.355 1.083
Individual Action (scale 0 - 1) -1.127 0.874
Cohesiveness (scale 0 - 1) -0.769* 0.316
Constant 0.606 0.391
* significant at pC.05 (one tailed test)
u
O r results show that the experimental street blocks were more likely to show decreases
in the number of males selling drugs relative to the control street blocks fiom before the start of
the intervention to afterwards (p .05). We also find that those street blocks with greater levels
of reported community cohesiveness (where the place managers in the study reported that their
neighbors on their street block would help each other, call the city to help them solve problems
on their block, and intervene when youths were acting in an anti-social manner) were more likely
58
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
to show decreases in numbers of males selling drugs on the street block 0, .05). This result is
consistent with Taylor’s (1997b) findings that show that where street blocks have higher levels of
in-built resistance, then the ability to impact the street block is greater (see also Sampson et al.,
1997).
u
O r results also show that when residents act in individual ways to solve street problems
(e.g., calling 91 1) it appears to be an ineffective way to deal with street block problems. Indeed,
our non-significant results of individual actions reflect this explanation.
The results of the regression model predicting changes in signs of civil behavior in public
‘places3oas measured by the number of females engaging in positive behavior (e.g., walking on
the block, going in and out of businesses) are presented in Table 7.8.
The public signs of civil behavior measure is a single item measure captured through
the social observations. The number of female pedestrians, females going in and out of business
and stopping to talk on the street represent our proxy measure of public signs of civil behavior.
The public signs of civil behavior outcome measure used in this analysis uses unstandardized
residualized difference scores. A negative value for the public signs of civil behavior outcome
measure means that, based on time 1 predictions of time 2, there is less public signs of civil
behavior after the intervention. Conversely, a positive value on the public signs of civil behavior
outcome measure means that, based on time 1 predictions of time 2, there is more public signs of
civil behavior.
59
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U.S. Department of Justice.
Table 7.8: OLS Regression Results for Changes in Signs of Civil Behavior in Public Places
Variable B Standardized B
~ ~
Std Error
~-
Control (0) versus Experimental (1) 0.45 1* 0.164 0.261
Residential (0) versus Commercial (1) 0.938* 0.237 0.457
Fear (scale from 0 - 1) -1.961* -0.214 0.927
Percent Female 0.646 0.131 0.524
Percent Af3can American -0.486 -0.1 16 0.453
Percent Resident -0.484 -0.1 15 0.549
Mean Number of Months at Current Location -0.001 -0.08 1 0.002
Number of Prouerties on Block 0.004 0.033 0.012
Collective Action (scale 0 - 1) 4.111* 0.263 1.896
Individual Action (scale 0 - 1) -0.253 -0.020 1.531
Cohesiveness (scale 0 1) - -0.268 -0.052 0.552
Constant 0.596 0.685
R Square = .25 Significance of F = .01
* significant at p<.OS (one tailed test)
As this table shows, the variable that is most predictive of change in signs of civil
behavior in public places at the 100 street blocks in our study was the scaled measure “collective
action” (explains over 26 percent of variation). As discussed above, this measure was a
60
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
composite measure of self-reported place manager involvement in community activism (meeting
ih
wt community groups, attending drug rallies, neighborhood clean-ups, citizen patrols, block
watch group activities). The more involved the place managers said they were, the greater the
observed increases in signs of civil behavior on the street block.
Table 7.8 shows that the experimental street blocks also had more signs of civil behavior
in public places after the interventions relative to the control street blocks (p <.05), and that the
commercial blocks in the study showed more signs of civil behavior in public places after the
intervention (p .05). Importantly, we find that the less fearful that the respondents were on the
block, the more signs of civil behavior in public places after the intervention (p<.05). Consistent
with the vast body of criminological literature (see for example Bursik and Grasmick, 1993;
Greenberg and Rohe, 1986; Perkins and Taylor, 1996; Taylor, 1995a, 1996a; Taylor and Harrell,
e 1996; Taylor et al., 1984;), this finding suggests that blocks where people are less fearful are
more apt to engage in collective problem-solving.
61
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Chapter Seven Appendix: Correlation Matrix
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
1. Control/ 1.oo
Experimental.
2. Commercial/ 0.00 1.00
Residential.
3. Fear Scale 0.10 0.07 1.00
4. Percent Female -0.02 -0.14 0.01 1.00
5. Percent African 0.03 -0.16 -0.23* 0.26* 1.00
American
6. Months at 0.04 -0.02 0.05 0.18 0.32* 1.00
Current Location
7. Number of -0.12 -0.28* -0.08 0.08 0.22* 0.18 1.00
Properties
8. Collective Action -0.09 0.11 -0.12 0.09 0.06 -0.04 0.03 1.00
9. Individual Action -0.12 0.02 -0.13 0.04 0.13 -0.16 -0.04 0.59* 1.00
10. Cohesiveness -0.07 -0.03 -0,.29 0.26* 0.19 0.07 0.15 0.32* 0.15 1.00
11. Disorder -0.23* 0.01 -0.02 -0.00 -0.01 0.03 0.20 -0.22* 0.07 -0.04 1.00
rg
12. D u Dealing 0.22* 0.12 0.04 -0.08 -0.05 -0.07 -0.05 0.11 0.16 0.20 -0.12 1.00
13. Civil Behavior
~ 0.12 0.31* -0.16 0.02 -0.09 -0.12 -0.10 0.30* 0.17 0.06 0.03 0.02 1.00
* p<.05 (two-tailed test)
62
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Oakland’s Beat Health program is an example of a civil remedy program that seeks to
control drug and disorder problems and restore order by focusing on the physical decay
u
conditions of targeted commercial establishments, private homes, and rental properties. O r
study sought to evaluate the impact of the Beat Health Program on drug and disorder
problems under experimental field trial conditions. Fifty street blocks were randomly
assigned to the Beat Health program that attempts to build working relationships with
residents and place managers, uses citations for building, health, sewer, sidewalks, and rodent
control code violations, draws on drug nuisance abatement laws, and coerces of third parties
(such as property owners, apartment superintendents, and business owners) to clean up
a blighted and drug nuisance places. These “treatment” sites were compared to fifly control
sites that received traditional enforcement tactics such as surveillance, arrest, and search
wamnts. To enable close examination of the impact of Beat Health on residential and
commercial properties, we used a blocked randomized experimental design by assigning
commercial properties to one block and residential properties into a second block.
Our project examines calls for service, social observations, and interviews with place
managers to explore the relative impact of the Beat Health program on drug and disorder .
problems. We downloaded over 7 million calls for service from O k a d Police Department’s
aln
CAD system over a 39 month study period and we spent several months in the field
conducting on-site observations before the start of the intervention period as well as at the
end of a five and a half month intervention period. We used self-reports of place manager
individual actions, their collective involvement in neighborhood crime prevention activities,
63
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
their fear of crime, and their perceived community cohesiveness to examine the role of place
managers in changing the social and physical conditions of street block activity within the
context of our randomized field trial in Oakland.
We found that the experimental street blocks targeted by Oakland Police
Department’s Beat Health program were also places that evidenced decreases in signs of
disorder, decreases in males selling drugs, and increases in signs of civil behavior in public
u
places when the social observation data were used as our outcome measure. O r finding that
drug problems decreased in the experimental sites were also found in the calls for service
data. Indeed, we found statistically significant differences between the control and
experimental groups when the number of calls about drug problems prior to the start of the
u
intervention were compared to a twelve month follow-up period. O r finding of an
a improvement in drug problems at the experimental sites at the street block unit of analysis
was consistent across varying “before” and “after” time periods (12 months, 6 months),
suggesting stability and endurance of the Beat Health impact.
u
O r blocked group experimental design allowed us to examine the relative impact of
the Beat Health program on commercial and residential properties. Our results suggest that
the Beat Health program and the control intervention (patrol response) had differential effects
across the statistical blocks included in our study. Importantly, it appears that the patrol
response (control treatment) led to significant increases in drug problems particularly at the
commercial properties included in our study.
While the Beat Health program seems to be effective in reducing drug problems, our
study shows no significant differences between the experimental and control groups when
violent crime, property and disorder problems were examined. Indeed, our results tend to
64
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
suggest that the control treatment was more effective in dealing with violent crime problems,
a especially at commercial properties.
u
O r research sought to assess the role of place managers in controlling drug and
disorder problems. In our study, we defined place managers as those people who live or work
near problem places and who, by virtue of their proximity and interests, may have primary or
personal responsibility to the street block (see Eck and Wartell, forthcoming; Felson, 1995a).
We found that the level of place manager collective involvement in community activism is
associated with decreases in signs of disorder and with increases in levels of signs of civil
'behavior in public places on the street blocks in our study. Levels of perceived street block
cohesiveness were found to play a significant role in decreases in males selling drugs.
Individual, direct actions (e.g., calling 91 1) taken by place managers in an attempt to
a solve problems at specific target locations were not associated with decreased levels of social
and physical disorder on the street blocks in our study. We also found inverse relationships
between fear and other place manager actions: increased fear of crime was associated with
lower levels of collective action, individual action, and cohesiveness.
Interaction effects between the treatment variable and other selected variables (such as
cohesion, collective action, individual action, and fear) were not significant. The failure to
observe significant interaction effects in these data suggest that while place managers
activities (particularly collective problem-solving activities) play a significant role in
decreasing drug and disorder problems, the programmatic efforts of the Beat Health Unit
most likely independently impact changes in drug and disorder problems on street blocks. .
This result suggests that specific, short-term program efforts (such as sending property
owners warning letters, enforcing property code violations, evicting tenants) contribute to the
65
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
observed decreases in drug and disorder activity. As such, our results indicate that police
0 effortsto impact drug and disorder problems can be effective independent of the existing
social climate on a street block. Conversely, our results also point to the importance of
effective place management in controlling drug and disorder problems, independent of police
efforts to solve street block problems.
u
O r results suggest that efforts to control drug and disorder problems on street blocks
are most likely to succeed when there are in-built resistances existing on street blocks (see
u
also Sarnpson et al., 1997; Taylor, 1996b). O r results indicate improvements in drug dealing
and disorder conditions when place managers work collectively with their neighbors rather
than when they react as individuals (e.g., calling 91 1) to specific problems on their block.
Individual actions--such as calling 9 11, calling the police drug hotline, talking to the owner or
tenant fiom the target, or directly calling a city agency to respond to the specific problem
a location--were not associated with reductions in signs of disorder or the number of males
selling drugs. This may be because these types of individual actions are typically reactive in
nature and represent solo crime control activities, and therefore may have minimal ability to
control problems in the long run. By contrast, the collectively-based activities by place
managers are indicative of more integrative and longer term commitments to controlling
street block problems, and were related to decreases in signs of disorder, decreases in males
selling drugs, and increases in signs of civil behavior in public places.
u
O r results have several important theoretical and policy implications. First, our
results indicate that fairly simple and expedient civil remedies applied by police officers, with
the help of municipal agencies, are effective in reducing drug and disorder problems.
Warnings of dire legal consequences of problems are not remedied, inspections and code
66
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
violations, and various forms of assistance offered by Oakland Police Department officers
and civilian technicians resulted in noticeably cleaned up properties, and increase in the
legitimate use of the street, a decrease in illicit and non-civil behavior, and reductions in
drug-related calls for service, at least in the short-run. These interventions were neither costly
nor time consuming, and might be strengthened by increased regulatory actions by involved
city agencies and additional work with neighborhood place managers.
Second, our research suggests that place managers may play an important role in
controlling drug and disorder problems. There is evidence to suggest that place managers
may be most effective when they are more socially integrated with their neighbors on their
street block and when they are involved in collective, rather than individual, problem-solving
efforts.
The apparent significance of collective crime control activities has several
a implications for the civil remedy program of the Beat Health Unit in particular and police
problem-solving activities in general. First, encouraging citizens to simply call the police (or
other city agencies) about problems may have a backfire effect: this type of individual
“solution” to the problem may inhibit rather than enhance the ability of place managers on a
street block to be effective in solving problems in the long run.Place managers who simply
call the police (and expect the police to deal with the problem) may be less effective than
place managers who seek a solution that is grounded in group-based problem-solving
activities. Second, police efforts that build working relationships with a core group of place
managers may have a greater likelihood of long term success than police building one-on-one
working relationships with individual place managers. Efforts to strengthen collective
neighborhood actions among place managers may also work to lessen fear and thus place
67
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
fiuther obstacles in the “spiral of decline.”
a
68
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
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75
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
APPENDIX A
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City of dllkland I-
I990 Population . I_
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has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
-
I
1990 Population by Race (White) I
1 -
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City of akland 8 a
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
r
City obakland 0
Household Married with Children < 1.8years I-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
r
City oeakland 0
I Educational Attainment (25+ High School Graduate)
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City o h k l a n d e -I
I
Household lnc.omein 1989 (< $5,000) I-
I
BERKELEY ; ,
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City oaakland 0
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City ohakland 0
Households Receiving Public Assistance in 1989
!
BERKELEY \
'ORINDA
\
h I
.. .. .
; MORAGA TOWN
... ,
' , ...
. ..
i
.-.
.
-:
I.
. ..
....
.
.
. .,
.Li
-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
-
City oeakland
Owner Occupied Housing Units
..
.,'L .
.. .;
...
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
e City obakland a
Median Gross Rent (Renter Occupied Housing Units)
L
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City ohakland .I-
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
City obakland e
Median Value Owner Occupied Housing Unit
! .
.
MORAGA TOWN
.
n
4
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
APPENDIX B
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Beat Health Study
Community Survey
I Target Address: AbbLZST
. Case Control No.
Date of interview
Interviewer:
Respondent tnformation:
11 Name of business or
How respondent was identified R a P S b
- Obvious place manager because of location
I
z Cornplainant/repqrting party
Identified by Beat Health officer or NSC
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
r I
Perceptions of tbe Roblem Location R Neighborhood Safety and Use il
1. How long have you lived [or worked1 at this location? 5. In general, how safe do you feel out alone on thk block during the ,
day? Do you feel.:.
*o
Ii
. of years -x Iz.
or months - SAT& AY
veqsafc, .............4
......... 3
Or since -[Putinyear]999+ w L k ~
........... * r*2awh4s*
I
Somewhat S d C ,
.... 2
Somewhat unsafe, or
DON’T KNOW ........... 1
Veryunsafe?
2 In the last four or five months [since last O t b r ,would you say
coe]
........... 9
DOMTKNOW
this block has become a better place to live/do business, a worse 6. Compared to four or five months ago [since last Octobcr], do you
place to live/do business, or stayed about the same? Would say now feel more safe, less safe, or about the same b c i alone on
this block is...
BaT€c
1 ‘d-, this block during the day? Do you feel...
cJlc p’ ,J’
Better, ................ 3 dW #“‘ CH ANGMY
Moresafe, ............. 3
Worse, or ............. 1 tu’? ,?I c Less safe, or........... 1
About the same? ........ 2 About the same? ........ 2
DoNT W O W ........... 9 DON’TKNOW. .......... 9
3. In general, how satisfied are you with this block as a place to
live/do business?
’1
I 7. How safe do you feel about being out alone on this block after
dark today? Do you feel...
I -
sm
Very satisfied, ........... 4 verysafe, ............. 4
Somewhat satisfied, ...... 3 ~
......... 3
Somewhat dissatisfied, or .2 Somewhat safe,
..... 2
Somewhat unsafe, or
Very dissatisfied? ........ 1 Veryunsafe? ........... 1
DoX”rrc(row ........... 9 I DO?;’TKNOW.. ......... 9
DOX’I’GO OUTATNIGHT .. 7
4. Compared to four or five months ago [since last October], how I
satisfied are you now with this block as a place to live/do business? 8. Compared to four or five months ago [since last October], do you
Are you more satisfied, less satisGcd, or do you feel about the same now feel more safe, less safe, or about the same b t i g alone on
as you did i October?
n this block after dark? Do you feel...
CWGSAT cwa bNiT
.......... 3
More satisfied, More safe, .............. 3
........ 1
Less satisfied, or kssafe,or ........... 1
........ 2
About the same? About the same? ........ 2
DoVrmOW ........... 9 DONLTKNOW ........... 9
” r . 1
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
would you say you do the following things -- would you
= Victimization, Continued
say you do them often (daily, or several times a month).
,. 12. In the past several months [since last October], haw you or a --
occasionally (several times a month), seldom (once a month or
less), or never? member of your family or one of your employees been a victim
while on this block? [Check ifyes]
-
of one of the
Qcru, Seldom New[ hl
- of times:
o
nA a. Park your c r on the street
a
on this block. 4 3 2 1 7 \r I L
C ,
ak
P 8 b. W l in the neighborhood.
o 4 3 2 1 7
c. Visit a neighborhood park specify:
or playgrouad.
ykt-11 m@*
4 3 2 1 7
b@b Stop and talk to neighbors
d.
on the street. 4 3 2 1 7 Perceptions of the Problem Location
~~
13. Are you aware of any problems at or immediately surrounding
.
...[the problem location . describe by address, name, descriptiolq
.
Victimization
. : . *. ,
or indication]? -. , , %
1 . In the past several months [since last October], has your car
0 -- or a mOSLEM5 I . ~ I . .
. &
4.-
car belonging to one of your family . ' \ ....................
.Yes l',!A #"t.. ,
:, .
..
broken into on this block? No .................... 2 4L.J I
DoxTmow ............. 9
i
:. *
"
LARBWXE
Yes .................... 1 No. of times: -
No .................... 2 1 . Next, I am going to mention several crime and disorder problems.
4
DONVKNOW ............. 9 Es/h'-ll Please tell me whether each of them is currently a big problem, a
small problem, or no problem at all at or immediately surrounding
1 . In the past several months [since last IOctober], has your house
1 -- the [locationjust identified]:
or business/iititution -- been broke into (i.e., burglarized)?
Big Small No
~Li!ZI\LARY problem Dmbleq @leq
Yes ....................
No .................... b04 a. People "hanging out" 1. 2 3
DONITKNOW ............. 1 2 3
ma6b. D u dealing
rg
I ~ ~ c c . Drug usc 1 2 3
--
Pw0bd. Blight trash, junk, g ~ f i t k
etc. 1 2 3
PPo8te. Nuisances (noise, barking dogs, etc.) 1 2 3
Pw6C-f. Fights, arguments 1 .2 3
--
Wbbg. Violence shootings, assaults 1 2 3
PVM~. Prostitution
wli. Other problems
spedfy:
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
-
i Since October, how many times haw you seen:
[Circle number of times]
- Satisfaction with Police and City Servfces
k a. A police car drive by the 28. In general, how responsive are the police in this immediate area tc
problem location? 0 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 lot community concerns? Arc they. ..
6 b. A police officer stop at the problem QSPtN 5E
location to talk to someone? 0 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 l o t Very responsive, .......... 4
C c . A poke officer arrest someone at the Somewhat responsive, ...... 3
problem location? 0 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 l o t Somewhat unresponsive, or .. 2
rbd. A city agency official stop at the problem Very unresponsive? ........ 1
location to talk to someone? 0 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+ DON’TKNOW ............ 9
3. Have you been aware of any organized activity or efforts to try to 29. How good a job are the police doing in controlling the sale and USI
resolve the problems at the problem location? of illegal drugs in this immediate area? Are they doing a...
UJ f =
d &oob 3 0 0
Yes .............. 2 Very good job, ........... 4
No ............... 1 [SkiptoQZ] Good job, ............... 3
DosTmow ....... 9 [Skip to Q28] ............ 2
Fairjob, o r . .
Poor job? ............... 1
4. Please describe the organized activity or efforts you are aware of: DON’TKNOW ............ 9
0. Since October, have you talked to a police officer in this immediate
area about block issues or concerns?
<ALL0
Yes ................... 2
5. How effectivehas this organized activity (or efforts) been in No .................... 1[Skip to (2321
resolving the problem?
1 How often have you have talked to an officer about block concerns
.
Gf UEW-
Very effective, ........
.4 in the past four or five months [since October]? Would you say ...
Somewhat effective, .....
3 b FTTALL
Somewhat ineffective, or .2 . ......
Several times a week, 6
Very ineffective? ........
1 Onceaweek, ............ 5
DONTKNOW .........
.9 Every other week, ......... 4
NA -1 Once a month, ........... 3
16. Have you been involved in these organized activity or efforts? Two or three times, or ..... 2
Once? .................. 1
R\NVbUx
Ye5 .................. 1
L DON~KNOW ............ 9 fi.7
No .................1 [Skip to QZS] ! Have you heard of the Oakland Police Department’s Beat Health
.
td4 -7
27. Please describe your involvement in these organized activities or Unit?
6W
Yes ................. 2
No .................1[Skip to Q34]
DON’TKNOW .......... 9 [Skip to (234)
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
II Perceptions 01the Problem Location, Continued
I
l . In the last four or five months [since last October], would you say
5
these problems have gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed about
the same at or immediately surrounding the problem location?
I DID n'OT LIVE/WORK HERE N OCXOBER 9 [skip to 0161
GA a. People "hanging out" 3 1 2
S b. Drug dealing 3 1 2 e. Conlronted the buycrs/dealers/crimiaals loitering at the.
1 C c. Drug use 3 1 2 problem location.
b d. --
Blight trash, junk,graffiti, etc 3 1 2 t-
* f. Called a city agency (other than the police) regarding the
L e. Nuisances (noise, barking dogs, etc) 3 1 2 problem location.
F f. Fights, arguments 3 1 2 6- g. Done something on your own to resolve the problem (e.g.,
G g. Violence -- shootings, assaults 3 1 2 evicted tenants, boarded up windows).
. Y h. Prostitution 3 1 2 h- h. Called or met with a community organization to try to
L i. Other problems 3 1 2 resolve the problems.
specify: 5-- i. Worked with police or other city agencies to resolve the
problem.
I 16. To your knowledge, have any tenants (or business owners) left or
been evicted from the problem location in the past four or five
5- j. Attended landlord training or other training program.
months [since last October]? --
19. J J have you tried to resolve problems at this location what has
Vy
WLW& motivated you? [Probes: Do the problems hurt your business?
Yes, problem tenants bavc left or Threaten you or your famiiy?]
been evicted ................... .4
Yes, but no real change resulted ....... .3 M'
Yes, "good" tenants have left. .........
.2 LhJ HJ
No .............................. 20. How effective do you feel your efforts have been? Have they
DON'TKNOW ..................... .9 been ...
17. In your own words,please summarize any and all changes you have EFPST effective,
very ........ 4 &bRL*bLbhL= 7
noticed at this location in the past four or Gvc months [since Somewhat effective, .... 3
October]: Somewhat ineffective, or 2
......
R f
very ineffective?
DON'TKNOW .........
1
9
21. Which of your efforts have been most effective, if any?
c WHlWCtQ
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
3ep
--e
th
Satisfaction 4 Police and City Services, continued
~
Informal Social Control, Continued
33. What can you tell me about the Beat Health Unit?
37. In general, if some 12 year old youth were spray painting a wall in
ol
this neighborhood, how likely is it that residents w u d tell them to
stop? Would you say it was...
zsc
3 . How satisfied are you with the following city scMcts on this block?
4 Verylikely, ............4
Would you say you are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat Somewhat likely, ........3
dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied with... Somewhat wlikely, or .... 2
Very Somewhat Somewhat Very ........ 1
Not likely at all?
Sstf pissat. Dissat, DON'TKNOW ........... 9
EA a. Street cIeaning 4 3 2 1 18. If there was a problem needing some services from a city agency
8 b. Garbage pick-up 4 3 2 1 today, how likely is it that residents would take steps to get the
C c. Sewer and sidewalk maintenance 4 3 2 1 problem solved? Would you say it would be...
b d. Building inspections for safety violations 4 3 2 1 rn?Cl\FJES
e. Rodent/roach inspections and control 4 3 2 1 Verylikely, ............ 4
Somewhat likely,........ 3
35. Compared to four or five months ago [since last October], in general .... 2
Somewhat unlikely, or
are you more satisfied, less satisfied, or do you feel about the same Notlikelyatall? ........ 1 .
about city services on this block?
ct! 65Ud
h.9
DON'TKNOW ...........9
- More satisfied, .......... 3 9. During the past year, have you attended or partiapated in any of the
Less satisfied, or ........ 1 following events i-t m m c f a t e neighborhood? [Check if yes]
n
........ 2
-a. Meetin&4:a community group concerned with local
About the same?
DON'T KNOW ........... 9 \
I
of
H.r.LIJL
problems.
3 __ b. Community fair.
Informal Social Control and Community Involvement
L - c. Anti-drug rally, vigil, or march.
'- d. Neighborhood clean-up project.
16. In some neighborhoods, people do things together and help I - e&Citizen patrol.
each other. In other neighborhoods, people mostly go their own : - f. Organized observations of drug activity.
g. Neighborhood or block watch program,
way. In general, what kind of neighborhood would you say this a -
is? Is it one in which...
O W W AI
People help each other, or .2 Respondent Information
People go their own way? .. 1
DONTKXOW ...........9 Fmdy, I w u d like to ask a few questions about you.
ol
4. In what year were you born?
0
YMR
Year
Refused ............. 8
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
41. Are you presently employed full-time, part-time, a student, a
homemaker, or unemployed? [Circle one or two categories as
needed.]
EMQLDY 1, EmQuu2-
Working full-time ...... 1
Working part-time .....
2
Homemaker ..........
3
Unemployed
Retired
Disabled
. .. .
................
4
.... ..
,
.. ... . , 6
5
Full-time student ......
7
Part-time student .... .
, 8
Other ....... .......
9
REFUSED ... . . . . . . . .
, 88
DOSTWOW
[ANSWER Q12 AND Q13 BY
42. What i your racial or ethnic identity? Are you
s ...
RACE
Black/African-American, 1
..............
White, 2
......
Hispanic/Latino, 3
..
Asian/Pacific Islander, 4
.. ..
American Indian, Of 5
.... .. . 6
Something else?
RENSED ............8
DONTKNOW .. . .... . . 9
43. Respondent sex
SW
Ml
ae ................... 1
Female ................. 2
44. Finally, my supervisor checks my work by calling a small number of
those I interview, to coriGrm the interview was done. Could I please
have your frrst name only, and phone number, for this purpose?
I Refused ............... 8
Number
t
No phone .........,... 2 -
This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report
has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.

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"Controlling Drugs and Social Disorder Using Civil Remedies Final Report of a Randomized field Experiment in Oakland California - May 1998"